The Relocation Discrepancy
by phwack
Summary: AU: To the frequent traveller, highways all look the same. It's the locations they link, crawling like a spider's web, that present the anomalies. Galveston was no different.
1. The Highway Duplication

_It's all the same, only the names will change,  
>Everyday it seems we're wasting away. <em>

To the frequent traveller, highways all look the same. The minor anomalies—the number plates, the places depicted upon road signs, the brand names plastered in a lurid clarity in ten-foot high lettering across the sides of trucks—all blurred to become the same intangible entity; insignificant details painted across the same flawed canvas. The faces that were passed—despondent through blurred windows, at the wheels of Chevies, Hondas and daring little mopeds—all spoke of the same hopes and the same subsequent failures teased out by the open road; by the anthems crooned out by rock-stars, whose lyrics presented an impossibly skewed point of view, nudged towards tell-tale inaccuracy by the plush setting of first class tour-buses.

Amy Farrah Fowler had seen two of them during her endless pilgrimages from one end of the country to another, a stale routine broken only by a brief foray into Canada (that particular adventure was chronicled only by the moose-shaped air freshener that dangled from the interior mirror). She maintained that, from the back window of the latter as it roared past, she had the privilege of spying the immeasurably dishy gaze of Jon Bon Jovi, an experience that she held close to her heart and consequently treated with as much secrecy as the government conspiracies that Amy had every reason to believe that her father was complicit in, given his propensity to drift towards a laconic nature whenever the subject was brought up.

(It transpired that the only codes he had been cracking were related to the correlation between the shade of red his various lovers' lips were painted, the clothes:skin surface area ration and the likelihood of them sleeping with him, but the revelation, however suspect it might well have been, had not yet to occur.)

In spite of her cynical evaluation of them, those songs transpired to almost solely comprise the soundtrack to Amy's road-trips. Stretched out across the back seat of the family saloon, she would prop her feet against a rogue suitcase and allow her head to loll back until she could envision it amongst the clouds. Between the frequent bickering that her parents enjoyed partaking in to pass the time and the endless stretches of dull asphalt, Amy preferred it up there, where the air was clear and the view breathtaking. It was from upon this imagined perch that she received her first view of Galveston.

The Fowlers had relocated a grand total of eight times before their only child's sixteenth birthday, four of which Amy deemed to serve no ulterior purpose other than to side-step the unfortunate backlash from their neighbours when the time inevitably came for them to acknowledge Mr. Fowler's lecherous qualities. This particular move marked the tertiary occurrence. Like the folding of proteins, Amy idly noted as they wound their way through Texas, the stature of the family's denial was intricate and yet liable to fall apart from those flimsy bonds at any given moment.

The arrival of their car, faded paint-work and all, to their destination was marked by what was apparently a sudden and inexplicable increase in temperature. In honour of the occasion, Amy detached herself from her daydreams and peered towards the city. All four windows had been dragged open as far as they would reach in a vain attempt to coax in what would have been a non-existent breeze, had the car not been hurtling forth at its current velocity, battling a sticky heat that had descended upon them like a curtain (a simile that had always struck Amy as inaccurate) the moment they had crossed the city's border.

Their home was bred in a similar calibre to that which they always occupied—white-washed wood, pockets of grass that would lay unused, neighbouring houses with whom the Fowlers would rarely converse. Like the highways that connected them, sprawling like veins across the surface of each state, there was nothing that immediately set them apart. Those carbon copies communicated some kind of pseudo-order in not only Amy's life but the tumultuous hum of suburbia—the petty grudges, allies formed and ruined over whose hedgerows brought the overall aesthetics of the street down to pitiful levels—but the snail's pace at which the car crawled through those suburbs allowed ample enough time for analysation.

By the time they groaned to a halt in their driveway, Amy had forgone that ill-advised display of naivety that her mom favoured ("This time, it'll be different.") and opted instead for a stony inspection of the residence. The paint wasn't truly white — it had peeled to a melancholy grey in the harsh glow of either the sun of years of neglect, the culprit made equally dubious by the yellowing grass that Amy hobbled out to, legs rendered momentarily useless by her extended stay in the back seat of the car. It painted a bleak picture, but it many ways, it called to some pathetic fallacy that the weather had failed to, bypassing Amy's sour mood in favour of a cheerful sheen that danced from any tangible surface. The air seemed thick in her lungs as she stretched, limbs and joints expanding with some difficulty through the humidity.

"Amy, stop daydreaming and help your Mom unload the car."

Her father's voice extracted Amy from what had indeed been a return to her apparently archetypal drift into an absence of coherent thought, eyes captured by the clear blue sky and that same, impossibly bright sun that warmed her back. She blinked and her Dad waddled past, arms compromised by two heavy suitcases that he accepted from her mother.

It wasn't a particularly taxing job—Amy's mother commandeered control for the most of it, plucking the bags from her daughter's hand as though the mere contact would cause everything to fall into disarray—but it was certainly menial and by the time the majority of their belongings had been shepherded into the shade of the house, Amy's thoughts had wandered off before she could acknowledge so. The slam of the trunk as her mother struggled with the last of the bags (Amy had put forth a valiant attempt to help, but she was ushered off with a stubborn wave of the hand) did little to lure her back to earth; the peal of voices, however, foreign with their Texan twang, succeeded where others had not.

If their dress were anything to go by, they had evidently just returned from the church to the rear of their homes, identified by the spire that reached up towards the heavens so heavily worshipped inside. The revelation was as fascinating to Amy as the family dynamic that they displayed. They appeared to be dysfunctional enough to pass for normal, the paradox itself making itself known to Amy only in retrospect. It was a state of affairs that she had no prior, personal experience of herself.

From the manner in which they trailed behind the mother, she assessed that they were an undeniably matriarchal unit (of the twins who brought up the rear, the female clearly dominated her brother). The father apparently was not best pleased by it, a conclusion drawn from the bitter argument he and his wife were engaged in, though the manner in which his children solemnly ducked their heads, Amy decided that this was not a novel occurrence. It was a lost cause to challenge the leadership of such a battleaxe, she duly noted, and yet he remained either stubborn or ignorant of this observation.

"Amy!" Her heart skipped a beat. Her parents' voices were there again, detached from their faces as the drifted out through the front door, hanging ajar. She pursed her lips in frustration. "Amy, don't hang around outside like some sort of vagabond. There's bags to be unpacked."

Oh, is there? It was on the tip of her tongue, a retort that would have sparked a predictable turn of events that inevitably ended with her father slamming the door behind him and mother and daughter curled together on the couch, the latter attempting in vain to subdue the tears that freely rolled down the cheeks of the former. The bizarre substitution of roles was not lost on Amy, who remained jealous of her mother only because her emotions so rarely snagged on the cool, albeit jarring appearance of logic.

So Amy remained silent, lips still pressed firmly together in a determined line, 180 degrees of well practiced ambivalence. She hoisted her rucksack further onto her shoulder and allowed one last, fleeting glance towards their neighbours. They themselves had retreated now to the shelter of their home, the last of the children turning as he closed the door with a peculiar air of certainty. Brown eyes met blue for such a brief moment that Amy found herself staring long after he withdrew. It took three further calls of her name on her father's part to finally lure her back inside.

_Another place where the faces are so cold,  
><em>_I drive all night just to get back home.  
>- <em>Bon Jovi; Wanted Dead or Alive


	2. The Sanctity Conflation

**A/N: Hello, lovelies! First of all, thank you for your reviews! They're very sweet (: I should probably mention right now that I have absolutely no idea where this is going, other than the fact it takes place over a single summer. You have been warned xD I hope that's not off-putting!**

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><p><em>I find shelter, in this way,<br>Under cover, hide away. _

It was well into the afternoon by the time Mrs. Fowler finally decreed that the state of their household was far enough detached from entropy to permit a certain degree of freedom. The sigh of relief that Amy expelled was, quite justifiably, tentative, as though she anticipated said mother to burst through the door of her currently haphazard bedroom and announce that break-time was over. It was a perpetual worry that lingered as heavily in the air as the muggy heat that still curled around her and whispered in dulcet tones that this was as good as it was ever going to get.

She peeled away her cardigan, a gesture that she'd been craving since the car had first pulled to a halt in sunny Galveston. It was an act of self-consciousness and comfort, not a search for warmth, that procured the somewhat redundant act of donning extra layers. Throughout the lengthy, albeit stunted efforts of unpacking their bursting car, Amy had stoically refused to go bare-armed. Not even the sweat that lay in a sticky sheen across her skin, glistening in the dappled sunlight that she collapsed into, prompted regret.

Lying on her floor, surrounding by the labyrinth of boxes that rose and fell in peaks and troughs, Amy could hear the harsh tones of her parents vibrating through the carpet. She clenched her eyes shut. It grew increasingly difficult to detach herself from the rising conflict downstairs. Their words swam in and out of her conscious thought in accordance to precisely where her parents stood, but the fragmented statements were significant enough to prompt Amy to wish the ground would open up in a cavernous glory and swallow her whole.

"Richard, I don't understand... now of all times, for Pete's sake... always do this."

"You're being ridiculous. I... just an hour... can't do anything in this house."

"—if you're going to be like that... why we left St. Joseph. I don't want this to be another—"

They proceeded in such a manner so rapidly, a frantic rally of insults and demands issued back and forth at an exponentially rising volume, that their voices blurred to become one intangible entity of rage. It was old-hat in the Fowler household. Amy would make herself as small as possible, curled and folded in on herself, until even she had to doubt her own existence in the middle of her parents' constant struggle for dominance. Her lips would silently chart the progression of such a quarrel until they remained motionless, albeit pressed firmly together, with the inevitable slam of the door that chose at that moment to make itself evident.

The house gave a melancholy creak and then all was silent.

"Mom?" Amy called, after the absurd serenity proved too much for her to bear. Her cheek was still pressed to the carpet. "Mom, are you okay?"

Amy's mother was, like many educated women, something of a battle-axe, though she disguised this unfortunate tendency to stray towards intimidating with a facade of perfect poise and a charming eloquence that Amy had grown to both idolise and, understandably, fear. She wore her picture-perfect, pleasant smile like a mask; it was painted in water-colour, just a shade too diluted to pass for genuine by those who knew her. Even in her lowest moments, cast down to a crumble by the conflict that threatened to tear the family apart, Mrs. Fowler was adamant in that posture.

When Amy finally plucked up the courage to venture downstairs, an uncomfortable sensation had gathered like a clenched fist in her stomach. Her movements on the staircase were desultory and sluggish and it had nothing to do with the empty boxes that littered each step like a minefield. She knew that her mother would not _want_ to talk; it did not mean that the requirement was not there. Amy Farrah Fowler had grown surprisingly adept at coaxing the self-inflicted tension from her mother's bones. Out it poured in the form of tears and Amy was left to pick up the pieces, to swear that she would never tell her father what took place on that sofa.

She found her in the kitchen. Her mother's expression had painted the perfect picture of determination and she scrubbed away at an invisible stain in the sink as though doing so would effectively erase her already briefly absent husband out of her life. Amy couldn't bring herself to advance any further than the doorway.

"Mom, I—"

"For goodness sake, _what_, Amy?"

The tone startled her, as though she hadn't heard it a dozen times before, and for the briefest of moments, Amy merely stood there in the acidic wake of her mother's irritation. Her fingers curled tightly around the metal coils of her sketchbook, each ring digging firmly into her palm, and she had to remind herself for the umpteenth time that it was not her presence that prompted such a harsh response. Even in his absence, her father picked apart the fragile bonds.

A thousand answers clustered at the tip of her tongue, the most prevalent being _I've got your back, it's okay_, but they shied away the moment Amy even considered lending them a more tangible figure. She ducked her head to stare at her sandals.

"I was gonna go for a walk. Just to look around."

The sudden, concave dip that her mother's shoulders took communicated the beginning of her despair and, had Mrs. Fowler been any less intimidating, then Amy might well have forgone her poor excuse and reached out to impart a companionable pat on the back or even, if she were feeling particularly brave, a hug. But their family was not built upon such arguably frivolous gestures and it would be lost upon them, in the sea of their petty bickering and tiny insecurities.

"Okay." The compliance came marked with a sigh. "Don't be late for dinner."

She resumed scrubbing and Amy forced herself not to look back as she walked away.

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><p>The walk took only five minutes because, as it happened, it wasn't quite as despondent as she might have intended for her mother to believe. Its duration was made ever more lengthy only by the extraneous efforts required to vault the picket fence—faded like everything else about the place—that encircled the perimeter of the house. It was rough and sharp splinters threatened to detach into the palms of Amy's hands, but her book was safe and the move was required to complete her fleeting escape to the heavenly realm that stretched up towards the clear blue sky.<p>

Churches had always fascinated Amy. She had never doubted that God was an entity imagined by those who could not explain the world around them, an opinion sculpted by the reverence with which she held science, and it remained one of the few things she had to thank her father for. His success rate regarding his family was debatable, but in a lab, even Amy had to give credit where it was due. He had instilled within his daughter a perennial habit for questioning anything and everything, to never accept an answer without extensive exploration. It backfired on him eventually. In the later weeks of that fateful summer, Amy would remark on the glorious poetic justice of it all.

Regardless of this boundless scepticism, there was something stunning about the buildings, architecture that came crafted only from a mind at awe with that heavenly deity, and it called to Amy's propensity for day-dreaming. The stained-glass windows that reached up towards the ceilings depicted such beauty, bright and hopeful, that she could forget the wars that had been fought on their behalf—the blood that had been spilled and an entire lifetime of suffering for those who did not deserve it—at least fleetingly and attempt to translate her sudden penchant for escapism.

Her sandals echoed throughout the cavernous room, describing her eager exploration with each clatter, and, as she observed her figure projected to a monstrous shadow against the pews, Amy had the distinct and achingly familiar feeling of standing in the presence of something that dwarfed her own existence. Ordinarily, the sensation seeped through the cracks of her awe in museums - in the face of hard science and proven fact. This was not her niche and yet, sliding into one of the centre-most pews, Amy had never felt quite so comfortable. She sat with her knees drawn to her chest and breathed a sigh of relief.

Her sketchbook, propped now against those raised knees, was filled with anatomy, mostly, from dusty old books she could salvage from garage sales and her imagination. It was, Amy supposed as the tip of her pencil began to etch away an impersonation of the largest window before her, where that fascination with biology and the human body originated from, albeit nurtured by her particularly ambitious parents. Even as she attempted to try her hand at another area of art, the valiant effort disintegrated before Amy had even turned her pencil to shading.

In the tiny, 4 by 4 expanse of white page left untainted by her lead, the girl found herself dedicating a cramped sketch, extracted only from the last dregs of memory that she retained from a moment just a few hours previously, to the bright-eyed boy who her thoughts continued to veer helplessly towards.

The light swelled and shifted with the sun as it completed its pilgrimage across the sky outside, but Amy was so absorbed in her sketch that she failed to acknowledge it at all. Her imagination fuelled the shadows that fell across his sun-burnt nose and the precise shade of corn-flower blue that stared up in monochrome towards her. The expression darkened as another shadow, a real one, suddenly danced across it.

She squeaked in surprise, feet propelling her up away from the pew and forwards. Simultaneously, Amy pressed her sketchbook to her chest and fell into that of the intruder. Long fingers curled around her shoulder, securing her there, steadying her and diverting the sudden desperation to do a runner. She glanced fearfully upwards and met the same blue eyes, startled this time, that she had endeavoured so earnestly to recall as her pencil swept across the page. In the ensuing silence, Amy swore she could feel her heart rattling away in her rib-cage.

"I didn't mean to startle you," he stated. It wasn't strictly an apology, but he was softly-spoken enough to warrant Amy to relax slightly in his grip. The unconscious movement of her muscles prompted the realisation on his part that she was still beneath his fingertips. He hastily let go.

Amy tipped her head. "It's okay. I wasn't paying attention."

"You just moved in next door." It wasn't a question, either.

"Um, yes. I'm Amy."

"Sheldon."

Whatever brief flattery arose from the revelation that he had indeed recognised her evaporated into thin air as the conversation petered away into yet another awkward silence. He—Sheldon, Amy reminded herself, rolling the name across her tongue as though experimenting the phonetics—stood still, displaying a boundless patience that she could not. Amy rocked back and forth on her heels and finally gathered the courage to look him in the eye once more. Sheldon did not appear to have relented in his gaze.

"Did you leave something here?" Amy finally ventured, mentally lamenting her lack of a more admirable effort to incite conversation. Her point was only proven further with the quizzical look Sheldon served her. "I saw you come back from church earlier," she explained, feeling foolish. "I wondered why you came back."

She wanted to curl up into a ball and avoid any more painful explorations of speech, but Sheldon appeared not to be daunted and considered the question. "I don't forget things. I just like sitting in here sometimes. It's peaceful compared to my home. I share a room with my brother."

(Later that same summer, Sheldon would confess this to be only partly true; he had spied her battle with the fence from his own bedroom and justified following her with the proposal of "scientific inquiry". One of Amy's favourite past-times eventually turned out to be teasing him on the matter.)

He spoke as though his statements were self-explanatory and Amy, in spite of having no siblings herself from whom to draw experience from, accepted that she wouldn't particularly like to share a room with a smelly teenage boy anyway. Sheldon didn't seem to be any older than her fifteen years and yet her nose was still filled with the distinct aroma of baby powder and cleanliness. His surreal aura was only accentuated by his beanpole frame that seemed liable to drift away on a particularly strong breeze.

Amy felt compelled to apologise again, as though she had claimed his spot and was intruding within mere hours of setting foot in that hot, sticky city. Only the thought of seeming even more pathetic than she likely already did prohibited her.

"I get that," she said instead, casting her eyes fleetingly to the soaring ceiling. "I don't really- I'm not a Christian or anything," Amy continued tentatively, conscious of the fact that it was highly likely that he was. "But there's something so wonderful about them. It's like, you can stare at those stained glass windows and forget everything. _With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world_," she recited. Over Sheldon's shoulder, the sun swelled in the lurid colours of said window.

"Ehrmann."

The declaration of the poet's name seemed out of place in his accent and Amy stared, searching for what had to be an inevitable answer to the detached statement; surely he was nothing more than a ventriloquist's dummy. And yet he looked back with such a cool certainty, eyes lucid and pure and showing the same assertion that they had in such a simple act of closing the door, that she almost felt compelled to apologise for the unspoken doubt that meekly trooped back to the very recesses of her thoughts.

"Yes," she breathed, fingers curling once more over the lead of her drawing. "Yeah, how did you-?"

"I read," he said simply. "Old papers, mostly, and physics, but the library's kind of limited on that. It's not like Austin. My grandmother likes poetry and the classics, so I get through those a lot, too."

(In another period of confession, Sheldon confessed with a rare embarrassment that he had read Jane Eyre three times. Amy silently commended the choice, based on her own unabashed crush on a certain Mr. Rochester, and yet, as before, her teasing had been light and yet merciless.)

Sheldon was regarding her curiously now, of that Amy had no doubt, because it correlated almost precisely to the expression she in turn offered to him. What followed was a brief dance of averted gazes and nervous glances, each attempting to sneak a peek at the other when they suspected them to not be looking and yet making an awkward eye contact regardless. Amy found herself smiling inexplicably, the corners of her lips creasing her cheeks into a shy grin that she was content to see Sheldon imitated. The uncertain laughs that followed were practically synchronised and she blushed.

"I've never met anyone before who knows him," Amy confessed, swaying closer. He conceded with an earnest nod. "But physics, huh? I like biology. My Mom thinks I should go into medicine, but I'm interested in neuroscience."

It was a nugget of information that she had been reluctant to impart to anybody since it had first been proposed to her by the biology teacher at her last school, a somewhat misunderstood woman who seemed to have ears only for those with generous IQs. Amy had yet to break the news to her parents, least of all her mother, who seemed liable to implode if her family even hinted at being lured away from the rigourously maintained track that she had crafted for them. Sheldon seemed less liable to do so.

The revelation seemed to pique his interest more than anything. "Biology was never of my own interest, but as my mother would say, that's not to be sniffed at. I—" He seemed to be wrestling with his own subconscious. Sheldon bit his lip. "I just graduated — UT. I'm going to Germany when summer's over to continue my research."

That was when Amy decided Galveston might not be so bad after all.

* * *

><p>She had stayed longer than expected in the church with Sheldon Cooper, their knees pressed companionably together as they crouched upon the pews and shared their dreams. She learnt of Sheldon's chronic feeling of displacement in what he deemed to be a nothing but "bible-bashing" community and his subsequent mental recital of each element on the Periodic table to carry him through the trauma that was his regular Sunday morning service (courtesy of Tom Lehrer, she later discovered, when Sheldon graced her with his own rendition); Amy in turn had shared the influence of her father's work in forensics and her suspicions that dead bodies were not the only ones he had a lasting interest in exploring.<p>

She had missed dinner by a long-shot, but when she returned home, the house was dark and still in the black of the night. Her father hadn't yet returned.

_Can you hear, when I say?  
><em>_I have never felt this way.  
><em>- The XX; Shelter


	3. The Big Bad Wolf Hypothesis

**A/N: Oh, my goodness, guys, thank you so much for your reviews. You're so sweet and I can't stop writing this, because I'm so inspired. I don't know if anyone is even vaguely interested, but I created a mix on 8tracks as a sort of companion to this fic; each song corresponds to a chapter - (just add /jordaaaan/the-relocation-discrepancy-1 to the 8tracks URL, as it won't allow me to link!). I went back and edited the first two chapters with their respective songs, but you can see the full thing there. I guess there are sort of spoilers, because it goes all the way to the end :P Listen at your own risk (which covers my dubious taste in music). **

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><p><em>The sun is up, I'm so happy I could scream!<br>__And there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be. _

In the ensuing couple of weeks, Amy bumped into Sheldon at meetings that transpired at such a frequent and meticulously ordered nature that she had every reason to suspect that such occurrences were anything but an accident. She elected not to mention it for the simple matter that a conversation with Sheldon was very much like walking on eggshells, but it intrigued her to such a level that Amy found herself attempting to predict the pattern of his idiosyncrasies. Sheldon himself appeared to have had her pegged from the moment she had vaulted the fence to the rear of their homes.

Despite the rapidly developing exhibition of the boy's reverence for routine and order, Sheldon Cooper was remarkably hard to predict. The following morning, after navigating the treacherous waters that was the Fowler family breakfast (she ate her Bran Flakes in the icy wake of her father's return, silently filing the venomous glances between her parents for future reference), Amy had returned to the church. It was cooler then and the goose-bumps that were procured were only slightly revealed by the unshakeable sensation of being presided over by something far bigger than she. Amy sat with her arm pressed against the cold wood of the pew from the evening before and waited. She filled five pages of her sketchbook before acknowledging that she was being ridiculous. That night, she made it back in time for dinner.

But then, in an act of stellar timing that was not lost on her, Amy chanced upon him at the park - alone. She had commented on the coincidence, naturally, but Sheldon had been quick to rebuke her with reference to "the construction of Pascal's triangle in relation to the binomial coefficients". Amy settled upon "happy accident", though she knew that it was anything but. The precise whereabouts of Amy Farrah Fowler had, not ten minutes previously, been announced to the entire street as part of an ongoing experiment on the part of her parents, to discern precisely how many decibels one's argument would have to reach before the neighbours had anything to say about it. Amy might well have blamed herself for prompting the bickering, had a similar event not taken place that very morning concerning the refrigerator.

By the time their fourth meeting had wound to a close, culminating in the affable—albeit slightly awkward—farewell on the sidewalk before their neighbouring homes, Sheldon had taken it upon himself to inform Amy of a social convention that had eluded her before she met him (Amy consequently suspected that he had fired such a debacle off from the top of his head, but given her own lack of any significant knowledge in the area, she deemed it out of place to comment). Three successive days spent in one another's company (five, if they weren't chronological) constituted a friendship and _friends_—the intonation of his voice grew significantly more pronounced with the emphasis on that word with a small, rare smile of his—helped _friends_.

It took a further hour for Amy to realise that he was asking a favour from her.

They had hedged around the matter in a way that was somewhat admirable, considering Sheldon's apparently eidetic memory (it hadn't been explicitly mentioned, but Amy had every reason to believe it was the case; Sheldon had recited the precise order of her sketches—having removed the tiny impersonation of him the very same night that she had first dedicated it to paper—with such aplomb that it couldn't be anything but) and Amy's chronic inability to let things go. When he finally revealed the nature of this particular favour, she realised in sonic clarity why it had pained him so much to do so.

"You're joking."

"Amy, we've established this. I don't joke. I find it to be a complete waste of time and effort, because most people aren't funny, anyway, and—"

"Alright, I get it. But _why?_"

Sheldon was reproachful, as though he couldn't realistically comprehend why anyone would ask such a thing. "Because Meemaw asked me to."

Had she been any better versed in her friend's habits by that point, Amy might well have been inclined to retort something along the lines of _"you'd jump off Brooklyn Bridge if your grandmother asked you to"_, but, as it happened, the statement was so vague and consequently so fascinating that she, perhaps inadvisably, just had to ask.

"Meemaw?" Amy repeated. Behind her glasses, her brows knitted together quizzically.

"Yes, my grandmother. My Meemaw." Sheldon's face broke into such a bright smile that she felt a little inadequate looking at it. The woman's grandson was evidently besotted. "She's not like the rest of my family. She bought me my first microscope. It's the least I can do to help her out every once in a while."

She regarded him sceptically. "But painting her shed?"

At any rate, that, Amy would come to reflect, was the precise catalyst for the events that truly defined that single summer in Texas. There was something absurdly companionable about the simple act of simultaneously being plucked from their comfort zones; a gentle push closer together by a shared disdain for any and all physical exertion. The sun was blisteringly hot and the stench of paint prompted Amy's eyes to water if she loaded her brush too heavily, but the hours would pass easily, blurred into one another by the rapid relay of equations and theories and essays that Sheldon seemed to take pleasure in firing off and receiving back from Amy. She was conscious that any ensuing thoughts veered atrociously close to cheesiness to be considered as a valid point, but it was an irrefutable feeling: Sheldon accepted her without question.

He didn't pressure her to remove her cardigan, for one thing, though Amy thought it to be imperative to note that Sheldon himself had something of a penchant for layering. His long-sleeved shirt was wrinkled at the elbows, betraying its age, and, before he had reluctantly tugged it up in a half-arsed attempt to forgo any more unnecessary sweat, the sleeves hadn't quite met his wrists. It was yet another quirk to add to an already rich tapestry, as it were. Amy was mildly exasperated with herself for displaying such an avid interest in her neighbour, who likely would not remain so for long, but then Sheldon would comment on the most efficient equation to calculate precisely how much paint he would need to finish the back wall and she would be enamoured once more.

He remained blissfully oblivious to the stern words that Amy had spent much of that morning inflicting upon herself—between proffering her opinion of Lewis, Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus and their Nobel Prize-winning work in embryonic development—and for that she could at least be thankful. Fortunately, the arrival of the much revered Meemaw herself diverted a potential mishap.

Sheldon's grandmother was diminutive in stature, that itself a surprise given how lanky her grandchildren were, but what she lacked in height, she evidently made up for ten times over in personality. By the time Amy had been appropriately plied with lemonade and baked goods (she only got a glance in a the latter after Sheldon had effectively demolished half the plate), her stomach ached with unexpected laughter. It was obvious why Sheldon thought so highly of her and Amy was inclined to believe that it was a unanimous feeling for those who met her, if Amy's own prompt admiration was anything to go by.

They sat in her porch, quite literally watching paint dry, with sun-burnt and paint-stained legs sprawled out in the shade. Sheldon regaled his grandmother with tales of college, from which he had recently graduated from (_summa cum laude,_ he stated proudly), and Amy remained silent, allowing the dulcet tones of his Texan drawl to lull her into something of a daze. She felt as though she could have fallen asleep there and then, in the wake of both Sheldon's familiar theories and his beloved Meemaw's kindness. The latter reeled her back into the conversation once it became apparent that Sheldon was talking his way around in circles.

"And what about you, darlin'?" It took Amy a moment to realise that it was she who was being addressed. "Shelly here can shoot the breeze 'til the cows come home. He mentioned you're a biology gal."

Amy slid him a sideways glance beneath her eyelashes. The perfectly tied laces of his shoes suddenly seemed to Sheldon to be the most fascinating thing in the world. She noted the pink tinge of his cheeks with a smile.

"Yes, ma'am. Yucky, squishy things," Amy added, hoping the direct quote from "Shelly" would incite at least some reaction from him. It did: briefly, he scrunched his nose at her, before gathering the plates and cups in order to make a quick getaway. Amy continued: "Physics is fascinating, but quantum mechanics just don't get my motor running."

Oh, she did not just say that.

There was a musical peal to her right and, for the briefest of moments, Amy was convinced that, against all odds (i.e. the lack of any discernible breeze), a wind-chime was tinkling cheerfully in order to diffuse what ought to have been the awkward wake of her perhaps ill-advised comment. It wasn't until it finished with a breathy _"ohhh, dear" _that she realised Sheldon's grandmother was laughing.

"Oh my, you are a funny one. I can see why my Shelly likes you."

It was Amy's turn to blush. "Oh, I don't know about that. I haven't known him very long. I only just moved in next door - two weeks ago."

The older woman allowed a gnarled, warm hand to encompass Amy's knee in a gentle pat, before she clambered to her feet with a groan. She refused any help from Amy, but the girl suspected that the consequent creak was not entirely due to the wood of the porch.

"If it pleases you to think it, sweetie. Sheldon's a quirky little character, but he's a good one. Don't you cast him off just yet." Amy opened her mouth to remark that she had no intentions of doing anything of the sort, but that sweet, caring Meemaw had already yawped with such a formidable volume that she was startled into timidity, her voice carried across the humid air as she retreated back inside. "Shelly! Don't you let me see you doin' them dishes."

Amy trailed uncertainly into the house when it became apparent that neither of the Coopers were returning. As it happened, Sheldon had indeed been doing the dishes. She eventually followed the sounds of his garbled protests—the first time she had ever witnessed him relatively speechless—to the kitchen. From her vantage point in the doorway, Amy caught a glimpse of two soapy hands clenched together behind his back.

"Meemaw," he was pleading, looking very much like a child in spite of the fact he towered over the both of them. "Just once. You let me paint."

His grandmother had already commandeered control of the sink. She batted Sheldon's hand away when he attempted to delve in to help.

"Sheldon, you have a guest. Don't you think you oughta be entertainin' her?" Sheldon seemed poised to protest and Amy wasn't offended so much as bemused, but his Meemaw brandished a soapy finger in his face. "Don't start belly-achin'. If you want to help so bad, set the table for me. You stayin' for dinner, darlin'?"

The inquiry brought to mind a thousand idyllic images of doilies and crackling fires - everything archetypal about grandparents that Amy herself had only very dim memories of. It was irrational: in her brief tour of the house, she had seen none of such things, except for, perhaps, the numerous photographs of Sheldon's immediate family clustered on the mantelpiece. Regardless, it communicated such a warmth and sense of charity that she suddenly felt inadequate standing there in the kitchen of someone else's grandmother. Amy pursed her lips.

"I'm sorry, I promised my Mom I'd be home. She's expecting me. In fact, I should probably get going if I'm going to make it back in time. It was lovely to meet you." She proffered a smile and yet continued to feel distinctly awkward. It startled her how easily the lie slipped from her lips.

"Another time, then. Moonpie, are you gonna make this young lady walk home by herself through those woods? Well, I thought I'd raised my little gentleman better than that."

Ordinarily, Amy might have been inclined to remark that if she were independent enough to attend her own parent-teacher conference alone, then she could most certainly walk through a few trees in broad daylight, but Sheldon's cheeks were accosted with such a red sheen and the smile on his Meemaw's face was so poised to make the transition into _smirk_ that Amy complied with a sappy expression of her own and conceded.

"I'd hate to get lost, _Shelly_."

He fired her a withering look that was pure Sheldon.

* * *

><p>It was evident that Sheldon had attached some kind of scriptural significant to anything that came out of his grandmother's mouth, because, for the entire first half of their return journey through the woods, he seemed to be channelling her voice in some kind of pseudo-parrot affliction. The transformation was startling; it wasn't until Amy found an opening in his endless reams of chatter and dived for it, substituting Meemaw for melanin, that Sheldon reverted back from a frankly disturbing foray into immaturity.<p>

The trek through the woods was not the only way to reach his grandmother's house, Sheldon had somehow segued into informing her, but it was the quickest—"as the crow flies", he remarked perkily.

"When I was growing up and my mother insisted that I ought to be more independent, I would always go the long way, because of wolves. Little Red Riding Hood really leaves a mark on a fella." He was kicking up leaves now as he walked and Amy couldn't quite bring herself to mention that wolves did not typically inhabit the area. "Eventually I decided that I wouldn't be inconvenienced by it any longer. As long as I don't wear red, I feel safe in the knowledge that I won't become another story book cliché."

Amy peered down at her red Chucks. "Thank you for warning me."

"You're quite welcome." She glanced incredulously at him. "Oh, I see. Sarcasm. Well, I'll admit, your choice of footwear is unfortunate. You almost certainly would be the first on their radar. They're kind of like bulls, I suspect."

The premise was decidedly absurd and Amy wasn't entirely certain whether or not Sheldon was teasing her, but given his complete lack of intuition regarding anything of the sort, she realised in an almost painful revelation, reinforced by the solemn expression he slid to her (_dead girl walking_), that it was a notion Sheldon considered to be a pressing one.

"How silly of me. In future, I'll be sure to wear my black ones."

He nodded. "A commendable choice. I must implore you exercise further caution, however. I would hate to break the news of your disappearance to your mother. Quite frankly, she's a little intimidating."

"You mean you aren't going to rescue me?"

"As I'm neither a knight in shining armour or, more aptly, a woodcutter, I would imagine not."

It would have been a complete and utter lie had Amy claimed to not be disappointed by the statement. "I see. Well, that is unfortunate. I do rather like living."

"Lately, Amy Farrah Fowler, as do I."

The sun was filtering through the thick green canopy above, drenching them in a dappled green light that seemed to warm Amy right to her core. The pair meandered past fallen logs and trunks that rose high above their heads, impossibly far and impossibly thick; occasionally, their hands would brush and Amy realised that she was actively searching for such moments. She wanted him to reach out with those long fingers and entwine them with hers; it was more the gesture that hinted he would never let go rather than a girlish little crush. (Maybe that was stewing away just a little bit beneath the surface.)

It wasn't until much later, lying irreconcilably awake well into the night and replaying every little moment of the afternoon, that the gravity of Sheldon's statement struck her.

* * *

><p>Amy returned to a battleground. In lieu of the physical effects—black blood that swelled knee-deep; the haunting screams; the low rattle of gun-fire that Amy's ears would hum with even after she put down her books—it wasn't immediately obvious and, initially, she hovered in the doorway as though to be patient was to avoid what she felt to be an inevitable reeling into the throes of her parent's bickering.<p>

"I can't do this anymore, Richard."

The statement dropped like a lead weight through Amy's stomach. It seemed to tether her in place, hand still curled around the door knob from her attempt to close it as quietly as possible behind her. Like most children, even teenagers, the thought of her parents divorcing was a foreign one. She was well-versed enough with the event plaguing her peers' lives to suspect that its effects were collateral and, as much as she disliked her father the majority of the time, Amy desired with all her heart not to be yet another statistic.

"How many times have we gone through this now?

"I mean it this time. Not anymore, not with this huge deal hanging over our heads."

"Then don't make a huge deal of it."

"And how do you expect me to do that? How can I sit next to you at dinner; how can _you_ sit there at Amy's school and pretend like you're a parent – a real one?"

"You always over-analyse everything, Bev. What do you expect me to do?"

"I want you to promise that this won't ever happen again. I want you to end it."

"Fine, I promise."

"You're such a liar."

"Now who's being ridiculous?"

The rapid rally back and forth between her parents rang between Amy's ears as she attempted to manoeuvre through the hall and she screwed her eyes shut tight, as though to do so was not entirely counter-productive. Each step she took seemed to echo beneath her feet, each floorboard groaning beneath a weight that was not in any way different to the countless times she had tread along a similar pathway prior to this ill-fated debacle. It seemed to bounce around her, but Amy continued unnoticed, judging by the continual verbal battering that each party took.

But then her foot snagged on the amalgamation of shoes that lay in a clustered mountain at the bottom of the staircase and she went flying, slamming roughly against the bottom step and skinning her knee. Tears pricked in the corners of her eyes, steaming up her glasses, but it was only partly out of pain.

"Amy?"

She was already halfway up the stairs, cheeks ablaze with embarrassment and anger, and didn't answer. She piled her books in front of her bedroom door to prevent an intrustion, but it was a redundant gesture; her parents were silent.

_Here with you it's perfect, it's all I ever wanted,  
><em>_I almost can't believe that it's for real (so pinch me quick!)  
><em>- The Cure; Mint Car


	4. The Russian Infidelity Conundrum

**A/N: Can I just say that I freaked out when Amy started singing Bon Jovi during this week's episode? It's like, GET OUT OF MY HEAD xD Thank you again for your reviews! You're all very sweet!**

* * *

><p><em>We're not the same, dear, as we used to be.<br>The seasons have changed and so have we._

By that point in her life, it was considered strange if Amy Farrah Fowler did not find herself with a new book at least once a week, whether borrowed or purchased herself, and by her third week in Galveston, it was no different. The library, which wasn't quite as pitiful as Sheldon had made it out to be, rapidly became a favoured haunt of theirs. There was something oddly comforting about the lack of any discernible noise—no arguments, nothing to distract her—that rivalled even Amy's sudden penchant for spending her days in churches.

Nestled away in a bright, albeit lonesome corner of the library, she settled back into her seat with the most recent of her acquirements, though whether that entailed the novel or the boy whose feet occasionally (and arguably inadvertently, though she could always hope) became entangled with hers beneath the table they shared was unclear even to herself. She and Sheldon had sat in a companionable, relative silence for upwards of an hour by that point, the latter having delved into some physics book as Amy departed. He'd smuggled it in from home, having lamented for the umpteenth time over the lack of any commendable reading material elsewhere in Galveston.

Amy had satisfied herself with the Complete Works of Shakespeare and had begun to lose herself to the genius of Iago when Sheldon startled her with a foray into the Ancient Art of Conversation.

"What are you reading?"

She peered suspiciously at the gilded lettering that proclaimed rather proudly whose book she had selected; the portrait of the man himself seemed to seal the deal. "Shakespeare."

From the withering look Sheldon gave her, Amy suspected that his question had been too vague to warrant the desired response. "William Shakespeare's surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets and a myriad of poetry, not to mention various collaborations. I highly doubt that you would be able to work through every single one of them in a single afternoon, even given your advanced reading age and intelligence."

"That was almost a compliment. Well done," Amy teased, procuring the anticipated roll of Sheldon's eyes. His lips quirked regardless. "I'm reading Othello. It's my favourite tragedy."

"Not Romeo and Juliet?" Sheldon seemed inexplicably relieved.

"It's enjoyable," she conceded, silently remarking to herself that the whole debacle was impossibly romantic for every inch that it was tragic. She suspected that Sheldon wouldn't be as much of a kindred spirit. "I find Othello to be more engaging, however. I find Iago and Emilia fascinating, even more so than the eponymous character, though his relationship with Desdemona, too, is interesting. Also, there are few other delights in this world that rival Kenneth Branagh in last year's film. He was wonderful."

Sheldon pursed his lips in an increasingly familiar expression that seemed to flicker to life whenever Amy expressed the appeal of other men, primarily elder ones. Only the day before had seen them engaging in a particularly enthusiastic debate concerning the best Bond actor; Amy maintained that Connery was the original and indeed the best Bond, but commended Brosnan's more recent attempt on account of unbridled levels of "hotness". It was at that point that Sheldon had escaped to the relative safety of his own home.

"I like Hamlet," he said now and it took Amy a moment to realise that what on earth Sheldon was talking about. "I hate to be so clichéd, but a little blood and grit goes a long way." He gave a wry smirk. "But I like the philosophical element to it—that nothing is real except in our own minds. _To __be or not to be, that is the question._"

"I had no idea you were such an expert on sophism."

"Amy, I have the capacity to be an expert on anything if I put my mind to it."

"Even Protagoras?"

"Especially Protagoras."

"They supposedly burned his books, you know," Amy continued, disregarding Sheldon's statement and idly flicking past a few pages in her own book. "Because he took such an agnostic position in his writing. I don't think I could bear living in a society where things like that are prohibited."

"You should try living in my house," Sheldon muttered, circling a paragraph in his book with a pencil in a rather surly manner.

Amy bit back a laugh. "Let me guess: your Mom's channelling Bradbury?"

"I hid my copy of _Fahrenheit 451_, lest she get any ideas."

"You poor thing," she cooed, her voice still compromised by the wide grin on her face. "Mine's pretty liberal, I suppose. We have a lot of books; I'm not sure I've even read all of them."

"Our "library" consists of the phone-book and several copies of the Bible." Sheldon raised his eyebrows in a challenge.

"I doubt she would be impressed if I lent you a few out, then."

"Hardly. It was an effort to smuggle my own books home from college. To this day, I'll never quite discern what on earth she thought the weird bulge in my pants was." Amy snickered, earning herself another stern glare from Sheldon. His cheeks were tinged pink, regardless. "It was a textbook! It didn't even look like that!"

"Of course," Amy sing-songed, sliding to her feet with her Shakespeare tucked safely in the crook of her arm. The movement served some ulterior purpose—she wanted to withdraw the tome, but felt ridiculous doing so by itself—but she'd been conducting her own experiment lately, deciding that if Sheldon could then she too could employ him for a little scientific curiosity (he still maintained that it was the reasoning for choreographing such chance meetings).

A brief glance over her shoulder confirmed her hypothesis: Sheldon followed her movements. She smiled and delved deeper into the labyrinth of bookshelves.

Amy's literary prowess, as it were, had begun its life mired in the archaic motive of impressing her parents, namely her mother, whose influence in her daughter's life was of such a potent and obvious nature that Amy surprised even herself by humouring it and waylaying what would have been the anticipated reaction to reject it. There had been a time, she would idly reminisce (as though she possessed years far beyond those that she held in reality), when the revelation wasn't quite as much a cause for concern as it accosted her with now and, frankly, it was a welcome contrast from the utter lack of any conceivable interest in her life on her father's part. His input comprised almost solely of a suspicion of men in general — and, perhaps, her admiration of Bon Jovi.

Her propensity for art, pencil drawings mostly, had been a by-product of her mother's insistence that Amy find an alternative outlet through which to channel her sudden influx of creativity—one, her mother would endeavour to insister with marked exasperation, that did not feature badly-tuned string instruments. The era of the ukulele—a couple-of-dollars bargain from a garage sale that Amy maintained was among her more impressive purchases—was somewhat infamous in the perpetually kinetic Fowler household as the only glimmer of defiance, however brief, that Amy had yet displayed. It met an untimely end (her mother would later confess that she had been concern that it would rapidly translate to those "electric guitars that you seem to find so enamouring - and who on earth is this Jon Bon Jovi, anyway?") two weeks after it had been introduced to the family, under circumstances that remained ever mysterious and so very suspicious.

That artistic flair marked one of the significantly more appealing betrayals, as it were, of Amy's stewing inclination to disregard all that her parents instructed her to, at least in mind. Her quiet desperation to keep the ship from sinking prohibited it from making the transition to body and it remained in a constant conflict between that craving for praise and her desire for a revolution, however small, schooled by the innumerable pages that her fingers had flew past so eagerly.

Such voracious reading habits , too, had been urged to excess by her mother, certainly, albeit inadvertently, and thus found Amy with a love affair, of sorts, with the library. The definite article surrounding it promoted a sort of reverence, like the church, rather than singularity; like the highways she frequented with a pang in her heart, Amy had set up camp in such a prolific number of the buildings, in rendezvous that had commenced long before the clandestine affair with the churches, that the details surrounding them—every little addition that ensured the girl that she was not treading through an absent dream—seemed to blur to one intangible entity. The musty aroma of a thousand old books, stained yellow by the coffee of their countless owners and the bright sunlight that pooled in graceful circles at the base of each bookshelf, enveloped her. It filled Amy's heart with a swell of optimism that she struggled to pinpoint elsewhere.

Her fingertips danced over each tome that lined the shelves now, the pads of her digits discerning the silent password of each book. They sang in a lyrical chorus to Amy, their words indecipherable to those not well-versed enough in their prose (to most). And when her fingers fell into the perfect groove, as though it had been waiting just for her, the decision was made. She considered the title for just a beat - and that was when it was plucked from beneath her nose.

"You don't want this, do you?"

"Pardon?"

"The book." Said novel was brandished by a stubby set of fingers in front of Amy's face. "You took your hand away. I assumed that you didn't want it."

Amy had, up until that point, been staring helplessly at the book—Anna Karenina, as it happened—with an unbidden surprise that suggested she was convinced it had detached itself from the shelf itself. In a way, it justified her reluctance to enter into conflict—even if she hadn't wanted the book, protocol dictated that it was surely polite to wait until after one had vacated the area—because to bicker with an inanimate object was amongst the most idiotic of concepts (concessions were made, naturally, for the uncalled for cruelty of the end of her bed and the role that it played in the stubbing of her toe).

Lifting her head with some reluctance, Amy was accosted by a shock of dark curls that seemed to teeter precariously over the slim face of the girl before her. Her mouth was twisted into a curious impersonation of amusement, though Amy herself wasn't entirely certain what she had done to warrant such an expression. In what she deemed to be an appropriately self-conscious reaction, she pushed her glasses further up her aquiline nose and peered back with an equal amount of interest.

"I was just thinking," she explained, meekly.

The statement evidently was not enough for the girl, who seemed to take it was permission to claim the Tolstoy as her own and tightened her grip on the spine. "Tolstoy tends to do that to a gal."

"I haven't read any of his work," Amy confessed. She eyed _Anna Karenina_ with a hint of longing; it was about the extent of her efforts at standing up for herself.

"He's bleak," the girl offered, with such a cheerful lilt to her voice that Amy could do nothing but blink owlishly at the absurdity of it. "I mean, if that's your thing, then by all means." She waved her arm in a vague manner as though to indicate for Amy to take her pick from the library's now non-existent selection of the author; as though she hadn't just nicked the last copy. "_Anna_'s basically like a 900 page aristocratic angst fest."

"And you like that?" The question had escaped Amy's sub-conscious thought before she had a chance to prohibit it. Fortunately, the stranger found it amusing; it was an entirely founded relief, given that the book she clutched was apparently channelling the soul of a baby elephant.

"What can I say? I'm the type of girl who likes hypocrisy and fidelity - or a lack of it." She laughed.

Even the mere idea of it prompted Amy to bristle, if only because the divide between her own parents was such a fresh wound inflicted by precisely those suspicions. She pursed her lips.

"I don't think you would continue with that sentiment if you had to live with it."

The quirk of the other girl's brow was so challenging and so very reminiscent of Sheldon (he would wonder where she had got to and yet Amy couldn't yet bring herself to leave the girl's company, in spite of the brief glimmer of conflict) that Amy had to do a double-take. She felt a compulsion to apologise, as she always did when Sheldon would rebuke her with his usual confidence, but her lips remained a thin line against the paleness of her features.

"My Dad was banging his secretary for a year before Mom figured it out and moved us here."

The confession was so abrupt, so blunt and unashamed that Amy had to blush on her behalf and uncertainly met her unwavering gaze with an apology. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"It was a year ago; I don't care. He was an ass." Again, that cheerful tone that was such an anathema to the theme that they had veered uncomfortably towards. "I'm guessing it's pretty new for you. Trust me, you'll learn to hate him without the slightest bit of guilt sooner or later."

"Excuse me?"

"You not only implied that a relative of yours had been unfaithful, but your tone suggested a certain degree of guilt. I assumed it was your Dad. Statistics suggest that it's probably the case."

"I never said that." Amy's face burned; her protests sounded weak even to her, but not even Sheldon knew of her concerns.

"You didn't have to. Don't worry, it's not your fault." Amy opened her mouth to make a somewhat spirited attempt at fighting back—even if it were true, she did not, under any circumstance, blame herself, nor did she appreciate being pigeon-holed so easily—but the domineering girl was off once more. "I'm Sarah."

"Amy," she responded, uncertainly. It was somewhat disconcerting how swiftly the conversation darted from one focus to the next.

"You're new here, aren't you? Your accent isn't the same as the others."

"I've only been here three weeks."

"I like to think that I'm your unofficial welcome wagon, then." Sarah beamed and stuck out a hand. Amy shook it with a weak smile. "You don't look very impressed."

"Oh, no, I'm just—" Amy stumbled in search of the right words—or the right excuse—to continue. "My friend will probably be wondering where I am."

"Is that the lank kid who's been staring at us from the end of the aisle since like, forever now?"

"I- what?"

Frowning, Amy turned in order to follow Sarah's line of vision and, sure enough, the lurking figure of one Sheldon Cooper hovered at the far end of their line, his head buried in a book. It did not escape Amy's notice that he held it upside down - nor that he was apparently fascinated by Jackie Collins. She smiled fondly.

"Boyfriend?"

"What?" Amy blurted, attention snapping to Sarah as though the other girl had just announced her intention to join the the circus. "No, he's— he's my neighbour. He's Sheldon."

Sarah was evidently not convinced and Amy had the distinct and very uncomfortable feeling that came from being so easily duped by someone she had only just met. Fortunately, she was spared from digging herself any deeper into a hole of personal revelation—having been mistaken for being in a relationship with Sheldon was not quite as traumatising as it perhaps ought to have been, she mused somewhat grimly—by the arrival of said neighbour, who appeared to have taken the sound of his own name has permission to waylay any further attempts to seem surreptitious in his eavesdropping and strayed closer. He did so with a markedly tentative shuffle, clutching his own book (he had replaced the Jackie Collins in favour of a tighter grip on the Feynman) protectively to his chest, as though nervous of making any sudden movements.

"Hello," he murmured, cautiously glancing anywhere but to Sarah's own eyes, who seemed to be inspecting him for suspicious activity. Amy reflected that the feeling was no doubt mutual on Sheldon's part. "Amy, I told my mother I'd be back for five. We're eating at Meemaw's."

It was only later, after an eventful goodbye during which Amy's new friend (an epithet that Amy herself had no part to play in the inclusion of) had succeeded into haranguing her "regrouping, same time next week" (Sheldon, naturally, had made some noises of protest, but they were promptly dissolved by a inconspicuous pinch on Amy's part), meandering back through the sun-bleached streets, that she realised it had been a complete and utter lie.

"Don't be silly, Amy. You know I can't lie," had been his reply, marked by an impossible smile that Amy was certain constituted yet another fib.

She hadn't said any more on the matter—Sheldon was obstinate in his ways and, besides, the more consideration she gave the entire debacle at the library, the more precariously Amy veered towards deeming the whole thing to be ridiculous and, really, she rather liked Sarah—but, as they said goodbye at the central point of their driveways in a manner that was becoming increasingly habitual, Amy felt somewhat secure in the knowledge that Sheldon was displaying, in his own peculiar way, jealousy. It both thrilled her and prompted inexplicable nervousness to pool in the pit of her stomach.

It was a pleasant sensation, like butterflies thundering against her gut—she had friends!—and, as Amy practically waltzed in through the front door, the memory that her home was forever a battle-ground lately fleetingly eluded her. There was a brief silence that rang in her ears and effectively maintained Amy's euphoria, until it was shattered by the muffled echo of crying. The feeling was swiftly dissolved.

"Mom?" She called tentatively, treading carefully through to the sitting room. Her mother was folded into the armchair that her father favoured, a cushion pressed to her chest and tears flowing freely. "What's the matter?"

"Amy, he's gone," came the confession, strained through tears and hiccups and a sob that Amy wasn't at all comfortable with.

"What? Gone? As in—?"

"As in the bar, where he'll take off his wedding ring. As in to some other woman's bed, where he'll promise her the world."

A heavy weight descended in her stomach, effectively crushing the butterflies that had swam there mere moments before, and it curled like a clenched fist there, stoic and unmoving. "Mom, don't say that."

"Why, Amy?" Her mother gaze shot up from the point that it had been directed towards, as though the faded spot on the carpet had dealt her a personal wrong (it turned out that that had been where her father had spilt a bottle of beer on their first night in Galveston; the colour was faded from excess cleansing), and she regarded her daughter with such unabashed clarity that Amy quailed beneath the force of it. "You're fifteen. You're old enough to know better. Every time we move, every time we upend ourselves, we say it'll be different this time. It never is. There's always a prettier girl, a younger girl in some bar, and he plies them with enough liquor to make even that rat-bastard look gorgeous. I can't do it anymore; it's tearing this family apart."

"But you still stay. We can leave, for once. Teach him a lesson."

"Because we can't keep doing this without him, Amy. We won't get a nice house, you won't get to college. I don't know what else to do."

"Don't just let it happen," Amy reiterated, clenching her own fists. She had toyed with the thought of venturing closer to offer comfort, but what had once been a regret was now relief; irritation was bubbling away in the pit of her stomach for some horrid, inexplicable reason. "Don't just sit there and cry. Mom, you're the one who's supposed to be telling _me_ everything will be alright. And it will. But right now, you're not helping anyone, much less yourself."

She felt rotten—she felt worse than her currently absent father—but Amy had already turned on her heels and fled the scene of her own immoral crimes, in part to provide a more tangible shield to the tears the steamed up her glasses than her own scowl. As she stumbled up the stairs, Amy heard Sarah; she heard the conversation that had taken place less than an hour beforehand and could not shake the feeling that the girl had somehow known what would take place, that she had experienced some premonition that provided a prelude to the inevitable.

Amy buried herself under the covers and screwed her eyes tightly shut. The blanket of darkness was impeded by sporadic blotches of multi-colour, swimming through her vision, impossible to escape. She couldn't help but feel as though it was an unfortunately apt metaphor.

_There was little we could say, and even less we could do  
>To stop the ice from getting thinner under me and you.<br>_- Death Cab for Cutie; The Ice is Getting Thinner


	5. The Shakespearean Comedy Interposition

**A/N: I'm kind of really tired and ill, so this is probably a minefield of continuity errors and grammar issues (Sheldon would _so proud_), despite having read it about ten times, so I apologise in advance. Thank you, again, for your reviews! For those wondering, both Sheldon and Amy are around 15/16; they were originally going to be younger, hence why Amy is sort of childish at the beginning xD **

* * *

><p><strong><strong>_Disarm you with a smile,  
>And leave you like they left me here.<em>

Amy had been an official resident of Galveston for a month exactly by the time she had reached a level of candidness with Sarah that the other girl had apparently adopted within a matter of moments into that initial chance meeting in the library, something that Amy was now able to reflect upon with not a small amount of amusement. The growth of said relationship had been chronicled primarily by visits to the library, where the frequency of their chatter was startlingly oft given its serene nature, with exception only being made during a somewhat awkward encounter at the grocery store. This was different: the tower of bookshelves, tall and leering, oversaw the beginning of their friendship with a sort of other-worldly presence that seemed to befit the pair of them—though it had to be said that it was a silent revelation on her part—and was consequently somewhat comforting.

It was not a sentiment that was echoed by her new friend (who had been far more forthcoming about such an epithet than Sheldon) and Sarah had remarked with an exponentially depleting level of discreteness that she found the audience of wood and the Dewey Decimal System disconcerting. It remained the only source of conflict between them, those crossed wires concerning the debatably ominous impression inflicted by the structure of the library, and consequently marked a rare attempt on Amy's part to stand up for herself. Its success, she suspected, relied heavily upon the surprise that most could regard her with when that rare lapse into confidence reared its head. Sarah was no exception to such a reliable pattern.

Despite its frequency, Amy suspected that she would never tire of the expression that accosted her companion's features when it transpired that she did indeed possess her own voice after all.

It wasn't strictly that she relished the prospect of an argument, though Amy had initially suspected that her pleasure was derived from an almost sadistic enjoyment out of it, borne from a lifetime spend beneath the cool glare of her parent's own constant friction. Fortunately, she was salvaged from embarrassment by the prompt correction of the concern that she had morphed into her own worst nightmare. Such a revelation came approximately a week after she had first met Sarah; she had spent a mere day with Sheldon, following that extended period in which they were practically in one another's pockets, and that, she would come to reflect, was the true catalyst for the intriguing turn her summer took.

Sheldon hadn't been impressed with Amy's fascination, for want of a better word, with the enigmatic Sarah, who presented such an oddity to her otherwise ordinary life that she was almost powerless to the lure that her company offered, even when juxtaposed with the somersaults her stomach would rather spectacularly perform whenever Sheldon so much as brushed her arm with those long fingers of his (oh, Amy, not now). Consequently, the time spent with Sheldon was not by any means as frequent or structured (much to the boy's apparent distress) as it had been.

Like an enzyme, their friendship still remained ever strong (they had experimented just the night before with communicating whilst hanging out of their opposing windows, complicated hand singles hampered only by the large oak tree that dangled its branches between them) and yet its rigidity seemed only to fuel some kind of rising tension at a startling rate. It felt like stepping on egg shells in his company and, as much as she was desperate to alter this, Amy's stubbornness prohibited her from bringing it up. It apparently did not help.

Sarah had been adamantine from the beginning that something else had transpired between the two neighbours—something, the perfect arch of her eyebrow connoted, that her mother certainly would not have approved of—that Amy had yet to determine, but, apparently, had alluded to on such a frequent occurrence that it was almost painful to behold.

It was that habit on Sarah's part—an inability to not stick her nose into the affairs of others—that perfectly justified Amy's own distinct line between the two relationships, a somewhat inexplicable affair, she would concede, given her own experiences of loneliness.

"He's my best friend," Amy confessed to her now, after her friend had once more displayed that penchant for chilling perceptiveness into her thoughts. She would stare at her with such clarity that Amy felt bare before her gaze. "I've never had a friend like him. We moved around too much for me to ever get to know anyone, but even if we had stayed, I don't think it would have helped. The closest thing I ever got to a proper friend was the janitor at my last school."

In spite of putting up a kind show to smother it, Sarah winced. "Amy, that doesn't count."

"Exactly. Now I've got two of you and I don't want to lose either - but Sheldon's like this baby deer. Once, I suggested that we take the bus instead of walking here—" She waved her arm in a vague gesture to indicate the library they sat in. "—and he spent fifteen minutes forming an argument for the—or rather, _his_ opinion, that anyone who advocates public transport is— well, I think he was trying to say wrong, but given that he didn't actually use the word, it's anyone's guess. I believe we missed three buses during that time."

"So what you're saying is that he doesn't really hate me; he's just terrified of these new feelings that are consuming his ingenious thoughts and I should force him to come to terms with his unbridled lust?" Amy glowered; Sarah smirked. "Alright, alright. So you're into him and you don't know if it's requited."

"Well, I like him, obviously. I just don't know if I _like _like him. You know? Gah."

Amy, who felt as though she had been waiting her whole life for something along these lines to sweep her off her feet, was suddenly not particularly at home with the sensation. She felt dizzy; she craved some kind of solidity to manifest itself beneath her feet. In an effort to steady the butterflies that rapidly thundered against her gut in a startling affair, she rested her forehead against the cool pages of an open book—still the same Shakespeare that she had valiantly attempted to complete before the week's end—and screwed her eyes tightly shut. In a display of rare irrationality, Amy mused that she would very much like to just block out the world.

"Boy, you've got it bad."

"I've never done this before," Amy mumbled, her nose itching against the dusty tome as it twitched. "The boys I usually like are about thirty and in bands that I'll never get to see, because my mother is concerned about tinnitus."

"Sheldon's probably got the mind of a thirty-year old, if that helps."

"Seriously? He was all jealous because I was spending more time with you. I'm shooting for thirteen, rather than thirty. Maybe he thinks I'm in love with you."

To be perfectly honest, it was a prospect that Amy had considered extensively, particularly during those hot, sleepless nights. She would twist and turn and entangle herself in the stifling covers of her bed, sweating herself into a state and wishing that she could banish those racing thoughts until the end of time - or at least until they moved again. Because it would happen, sooner or later, and therein lay yet another trepidation of the situation, of which she had many. Amy knew it wasn't worth it; judging by the trajectory of their recent movements, in gaping arcs that left little to be predicted, they'd end up in Alaska by Christmas.

"Maybe I should just tell him that I am and sort this out once and for all," she mumbled in continuation, shooting Sarah a pointed look beneath her eyelashes.

"Even if you did profess some kind of forbidden love for me, you can't get rid of me that easily."

Sarah once more succeeded, where so many had failed, in extracting a rather unladylike snort from Amy. She ducked her head and smiled in spite of herself; like many teenagers, she found the thought of grinning through her obvious despair to act as a complete anathema to the aura she had, up until that point, been attempting to bolster.

"Sheldon's not really like you, though."

"Thank God!" Laughing, Sarah threw herself languidly back into her chair, earning a cold stare from the librarian, and rested her own book on her flat stomach. "He's such a whack-job."

Amy reached out with a lazy arm and pinched her friend lightly on the forearm, pursing her lips. "He's not! He's just— he's different."

The look that she received in reply was hardly convinced and, quite frankly, Amy herself wasn't quite certain of her statement, either. She had long since attempted to employ the revelation that Sheldon Cooper was a sandwich short of a picnic as part of her ever ongoing efforts to detach herself from his gravitational pull. Needless to say, it was a continual failure, of which the damage was rapidly developing to be collateral.

* * *

><p>The sun was setting by the time Amy returned home, casting sprawling orange pools across the wilting grass and maintaining the warm caress against her back as it had since she began her solitary journey home. Amy was gripped by a rare carelessness as she ambled slowly down the well-beaten pavement to her house, sandals scuffing against the concrete as though she really didn't mind whether or not the colour would scratch off (she would assess them later for damage, naturally).<p>

It was a pleasant enough sensation, that weightlessness that seemed to raiser her from the earth's gravitational pull in a consistency that was somewhat startling, that she, at some point, drifted into her own world and consequently didn't acknowledge her name being called from over the fence that separated her house from the Cooper's until a deft hand caught her shoulder.

"Amy!" The exasperation with which her name was repeated was Amy's only indication that it had been a repetitive obliviousness.

She turned, meeting the pair of clear blue eyes that she knew so very well, and was appropriately surprised to speechlessness when it struck her that the Cooper that gazed back was not the family member that she had anticipated.

Despite Sheldon's less than glowing review of his sister—on the odd occasion than Amy plucked up the courage to probe—Missy had always been the kind of girl that Amy unabashedly envied. Her intelligence was clearly not on the same level as her brother's (he would remark with thinly—if at all—veiled pride) or even Amy's; that was evident in the absent way she twirled her hair and smacked her lips through copious amounts of gum. She was not rational, nor was she particularly academic—Amy reflected that her hair would have been far more suited to blonde—and yet there was a clarity to those eyes of hers, apparently a staple of the Coopers, that implied an intuitiveness and level of street smarts that had clearly bypassed Sheldon.

It was one amongst many redeeming qualities that Amy's thoughts helplessly drifted towards as she remained stuck in a state of relative shock that someone like Missy Cooper was even giving her the time of day. Amy felt, once more, the almost overpowering sense of inadequacy in the presence of a peer whose skin was tanner than hers, legs longer, stomach flatter and teeth whiter. She shyly ducked her head, as though entirely unworthy of continuing to look.

"Hello." Her reply was meek - almost pathetic, really. She automatically felt entirely ridiculous.

"What's this about you fightin' with Shelly?"

Blinking owlishly up at Missy through thick spectacles, Amy reached for a recollection that they had even explicitly stated it to be so and returned empty-handed.

"What? I don't think— we're not—"

"Oh, please, you two were like this—" Missy had breezed past the feeble protest with a wave of her hand that she brandished to Amy not, two fingers entwined in one another to indicate a certain closeness. Amy blushed. "And he hasn't seen you in a week."

She elected not to mention the window affair less than twenty-four hours prior to this sudden and wholly unexpected encounter on their front lawns. It would have hardly helped her own cause, the details of which remained ever dubious, and besides, if neither she nor Sheldon were willing to grace their current status with any specifics, then it was the least she could do to pass that particular torch onto Missy.

"He and my other friend don't really get along," Amy confessed, offering a sheepish glance in return. "I've been spending a lot of time with her."

"Shelly doesn't like someone? Now that I can believe," Missy replied with a scoff and a bemused roll of her eyes. "He was never good with people. Guess that's why we were all so surprised when he found you."

Amy's look shifted to a distinctly sceptical affair. "Me? Oh, I don't know about that."

"He doesn't stop talking about you at dinner. Momma said she's never known him to have any interest in nothin' but science since he was small. Even Daddy finds it amusin' and he never was best pleased when Shelly kept gabbin' through Sunday lunch."

Amy felt the sudden, inexplicable compulsion to pirouette her way in a full circle of the lawn. She smothered the desire with some difficulty, but her cheeks remained a dappled pink regardless of the internal battle that still raged.

"But it's Sheldon," she pointed out, as though Missy had somehow lost all recognition that her brother was— well, he was _Sheldon_. She bit her lips. "I never know what he's thinking."

"You think any of us do? There was this one time he stole my Barbie dolls to practice his death-ray on - he said my Care Bears were safe 'cause I'd "formed some attachment" or whatever he says. And he was terrified of the Care Bear stare." Missy seemed to take Amy's snicker as concrete evidence that her brother had finally traversed all expectations and discovered one of his own species. "Shelly's a quirky one, but he's still a boy - and my brother. He's more predictable than you think; it just takes a little time. Please, for the love of Jesus, don't give up on him. I ain't ever seen him so normal."

Amy decided that it was definitely a compliment.

* * *

><p>Regardless of the myriad of reassurances that Missy had been inadvertently coerced into bestowing upon her, it took two hours for Amy to finally pluck up the courage to go over to Sheldon's. She had spent much of it wandering restlessly around the comparatively restrictive surface area of her bedroom, rehearsing a speech to an imaginary boy that was prone to veer off course frequently and significantly. It reached an unfortunate apex upon the revelation that she was talking complete and utter nonsense and it was at approximately that point that Amy finally pulled herself together.<p>

As she stood in the Cooper's porch—the wood wasn't half as faded as the Fowler's—Amy was accosted once more by the compulsion to bury herself beneath the covers and forget the whole debacle once and for all. She and Sheldon were apparently very good at avoiding the integral. She rocked back and forth on her heels, gnawing incessantly against her lower lip, but Amy's knuckles had already rapped against the door by the time it occurred to her that this quite possibly might not have been such a founded idea.

Her ears pricked as the chaos of the family hummed through the wood and then it swung open. Amy's relief was imminent as Missy looked knowingly down at her.

"Shelly!" She yawped, eliciting a start from the other girl. "Your girlfriend's here."

"She's not my girlfriend; she's a friend who's a girl."

Unwittingly rising to her tip-toes, Amy peered curiously around Missy's shoulder to see Sheldon himself teetering on the bottom step, arms folded stubbornly over his chest and the Batman insignia emblazoned there. She waved shyly and was pleased when Sheldon returned the gesture with a small smile.

"Can I talk to you?" Amy ventured, meeting his eyes uncertainly.

And that was how she found herself kicking up the dead leaves that coated the forest floor in parallel to their last pilgrimage through those woods. It felt as though it had transpired such a lifetime ago, though in reality it hadn't been any more than a month or so. It seemed to be that so much had changed since then, though given Sheldon's taciturn tendencies, Amy had every reason to believe that she was alone in such an assumption.

During their quiet walk, punctuated only by brief forays into what Sheldon would, ordinarily, have deemed to be nothing more than banal chit-chat, she attempted to cajole him into some progress by providing ample opportunities for Sheldon to take her up on, proffered by the surreptitious brush of her hand against his, the angle of her shoulders toward him. The unspoken ventures between them lingered so heavily on the air that remained ever muggy, despite the ever progressing hour, and Amy felt as though she might burst.

Fortunately, Sheldon spoke before an unfortunate accident could occur.

"I was under the impression that a request to speak entailed a purpose as opposed to mindless chatter."

Amy sighed. "Yes. Your sister believed us to be fighting. I'm inclined to say that it's true."

"Missy says many things, most of which are mired in fiction."

"Sheldon," she sighed, catching his arm. They drew to a halt, engaging in such a staring match that Amy once more wondered why on earth she even entertained the thought that this was a founded idea. "It's Sarah, isn't it?"

He pursed his lips. "Not entirely, though I believe she may be a catalyst."

"For what exactly?" Amy probed, eyes scouring his expression for some signal, even the slightest glimmer, of which cogs ticked away behind it. In an infuriatingly frequent conclusion, Sheldon revealed nothing. "Sheldon, please."

"I find myself—" For the first time in her company, he was speechless. Blinking heavily, he gathered his thoughts, the calculations evident behind clear blue eyes, and Amy waited with almost bated breath. "I find myself suffering a feeling that, prior to a month ago, I had yet to be afflicted with. It had been my intention to bury it, as it were, primarily because my mother had always informed me that it was not an emotion to be proud of. Give or take a few syntactical errors."

"But your mother also refutes the theory of evolution."

Sheldon nodded, almost begrudgingly. "That had also crossed my mind. It's why I conceded to this walk. My evening was originally designated for a jigsaw depiction of Tatooine."

She elected not to comment. "And this feeling - what was it?"

A beat of silence. Amy was positive that he could hear her heart pounding against her rib-cage.

"Jealousy, amongst other things."

"Sheldon, if you had said— I am proficient at many things, but not mind-reading." The look she braced him with was disapproving, almost. With a small expulsion of air from clenched teeth, Amy continued in confession: "I find myself frustrated with this lack of communication."

"I— Amy, I don't know how to proceed. It wasn't my intention— I would never intentionally do so. I— _Sigh no more, men were deceivers ever._"

Their lips had connected even before he had finished paraphrasing Shakespeare. With her grip on his shoulders, Amy leaned up and eradicated the increasingly small space between them with such fervour that even she surprised herself. She felt the breath that hitched in Sheldon's throat at the sudden onslaught of affection and, for the briefest of moments, all was still. Her heart began to plummet, proceeding in a free-fall right through to her gut—had he joined forces with Missy to make a fool of her?—but then there was a pressure on her hips as Sheldon's fingertips splayed out there.

He was kissing her back and Amy thought that her heart might implode. Her hands shifted to his chest, fingers dancing across the Batman insignia in a tentative exploration, but then her girlishness got the better of her and Amy was giggling into his mouth. They remained connected for just a split second longer, before Sheldon inched his head backwards, eyes roaming towards hers in mingling concern and confusion.

"Was my kissing not satisfactory?"

Horror of horrors, that set Amy off again, and she removed one hand in a spirited attempt to smother her chortles, stuffing her knuckles inside her mouth. She shook her head. "What? I mean— no, no, you were fine. You're wonderful. You're just— you're _Sheldon._"

The boy himself looked wholly disgruntled at being informed as such. "I am well aware of that."

"I'm sorry," Amy managed, breathlessly, still recovering from her giggling fit. She rose to her tip-toes once more. "This is just my first time. I can't believe it's happening."

"I tend to have that effect on people."

Sheldon replied with such an air of self-assuredness and such a haughty casting of his eyes up to the heavens that Amy suspected she was liable to crumble into laughter once more, but the quirk of his lips indicated that he at least did not expect to be taken seriously and, when he leaned in for another kiss, he was smiling against her lips in a way that made Amy consider throwing all forms of logic to the wind and floating off into the sunset. Given that she, Amy Farrah Fowler, was _kissing Sheldon_, it was perhaps safe to say that stranger things had happened.

_I used to be a little boy, so old in my shoes  
>And what I choose is my voice,<br>__What's a boy supposed to do?  
><em>- The Smashing Pumpkins; Disarsm


	6. The Superman Intervention

**A/N: Dedicated to Harry, for making me churn this out quicker than I probably would have otherwise xD I think this is my favourite chapter. As always, thank you very much for inspiring me with your lovely reviews!**

* * *

><p><em>So if by the time the bar closes<br>And you feel like falling down  
>I'll carry you home <em>

Since "the Forest Incident" (a title that evening had been bestowed with by, naturally, Sarah, though notably without the reverence that Amy subsequently rested upon it) two days previously, Amy had existed on a level that seemed to be more on par with Cloud Nine than the level of rationale that she ordinarily seemed to be somehow renowned for and, as far as she was concerned, there was little anyone could say that would convince the girl that she in any way could be blamed. She hadn't told her mother, despite the fact she had been vying for an "eligible suitor" (the phrase simultaneously disgusted Amy and yet made her feel remarkably special at the same time) with whom to match her daughter since her niece had become engaged, nor had Amy even dared to break the news to her father (really, his level of hypocrisy was astounding).

It remained a wonderful little secret that she could keep nestled against her heart, nurturing it, allowing the perpetual warmth to spread from her chest to the tips of her toes until she felt absolutely ridiculous entertaining it. The secret had remained so—personal—for a grand total of thirty minutes, approximately the duration of her return journey with Sheldon (she had stolen a peck on the cheek, but as they drew closer to their homes, Sheldon had grown predictably bashful). In the spirit of friendship—and the other girl's prior insistence that _extreme measures_ were the only viable option with a certain Cooper—Amy had ventured that it was the least she could do to let Sarah in on the debacle.

She also felt as though she might burst with excitement if it were kept bottled up any longer.

The beeline that she made for the phone was hampered only by Amy's sudden compulsion to dance; by the time her restlessness finally carried her to it, she was positively bursting. The ensuing result was a lengthy conversation with Sarah herself (hours, Mrs. Fowler had so irritably claimed), to whom Amy had gushed with such fervour that, for once, the other girl was powerless to get a word in edgeways.

It was perhaps significant to note that the actual revelation that Sheldon had indeed kissed her (Amy deemed herself perfectly justifiable in allowing a few artistic liberties) didn't transpire until Sarah had put it to Amy that this romantic tension really was getting a bit embarrassing and if she didn't do anything about it soon, then she would have to quite literally bang their heads together. Amy herself had been more than a little indignant on such an affair and proceeded to relay the situation with such precision that even Sheldon would have surely been proud of her sudden foray into eidetic memory.

The whole tale, punctuated sporadically by wistful sighs (Amy) and irritable coughs (who else?), finished on a somewhat flat note when Amy arrived at the conclusion that, well, she really didn't know how to proceed from there, to which Sarah had replied, with all of her usual tact, that the world wasn't ready for little carbon copies of Sheldon Cooper running around, anyway. Amy's cheeks had flushed to a predictable scarlet and, quite unfortunately, her thoughts of Sheldon were forever sullied by the mere suggestion they had considered _that. _

(Amy thought it prudent not to mention that, alright, yes she had, but frankly, could anyone blame her?)

Even now, Amy found it a task to look Sheldon in the eye without blushing furiously. Quite frankly, she had little reason to be afflicted with such an exaggerated nervousness, given that she had never felt such a crippling strangeness in his presence, and then with the revelation that, but for their rendezvous of sorts in the woods behind their street, neither she or Sheldon had given the other any reason to believe that anything had changed between them.

She didn't know if it was a mere combined awkwardness on their part, given that neither of them were particularly adept with social graces, and, to be perfectly honest, Amy was just grateful that they appeared to have returned to their normal, seamless functioning. The adrenaline, of sorts, that she had been running on throughout the entire course of her rather bold occupation, as it were, of his lips had dwindled dramatically by that point. It had depleted to such an extent that Amy found her palms sweating helplessly whenever he drew near.

"I have a present for you," she said now, glancing to him. Her grin was a small one, but it remained so stubbornly on her face that Amy had little choice but to humour it and allow it to settle.

Sheldon immediately looked uncomfortable. Great start, then. "What is the occasion?"

"There isn't one. There doesn't have to be. I just thought since—" _Since we played tonsil tennis. _"It's just a thing."

He didn't look convinced. "But the entire point of gift-giving is that it's a reciprocal process. I don't have anything for you."

"You don't have to give me anything. I just—" Amy suddenly wished that she'd kept said gift, which really wasn't worth the hassle, kept quite literally under lock and key, but if there were one thing that she had learned about Sheldon Cooper, it was that he, like a dog with a bone, refused to let anything go. She dragged it out from the pocket of her shorts, a crumpled paper affair, and pressed it into his hands: the portrait that she had sneaked of him that day in the church. "I made it a while ago. When we first met."

"It's me." Amy nodded fervently. "I wasn't aware that you were so adept at drawing."

"Is that a compliment, Mr Cooper?" She teased, bumping their knees together.

The pair had been sitting in a comfortable solitude for a good hour now, cross-legged by a tiny babbling brook - Amy with her hands delving deep into the dirt that she had no issues with sitting directly upon; Sheldon on his discarded jacket, naturally with an abundance of complaints as Amy set up camp. In the spirit of her usual attempts at procuring some kind display of affection—or at least an invitation to talk about it, via a short _what on earth are you doing?_—she had shuffled ever closer until their knees were pressed companionably together. She supposed it was some progress that Sheldon hadn't done a runner there and then.

He was blushing now, dappled pink spreading across his cheeks, and Amy deemed that to be more of a step in the right direction than any of the innumerable amount of supposed signs that she had documented that afternoon.

"I suppose it is." His fingers curled almost protectively around the drawing, covering it with his large palm. "Thank you, Amy. It's wonderful."

Had there ever been a more opportune moment to kiss someone, Amy demanded proof of it, because the silence that fell between the two of them then was laden with such implicature and such, well, tension, for lack of a better word, that she was almost tempted into grabbing poor Sheldon's face and subjecting him to another snog. Once more, her stubbornness prevailed. Amy maintained that she would succeed sooner or later.

"I'm glad you don't think it's creepy."

"Given the circumstances, I believe I'm able to make an exception." Sheldon smirked. Oh, lord. "This is one gift that I'm incapable of reciprocating. My portraits look like potatoes with stick arms."

Stifling a giggle, Amy quirked an eyebrow at him. The concession of the fact that he wasn't perfectly adept at, well, everything was surprising and yet she had every reason to believe that truer words had never been spoken.

"Pity. I'm sure they would make great self-portraits."

Pouting, Sheldon flicked her knee.

* * *

><p>"Put something nice on, Amy. We're going out for dinner!"<p>

The blunt statement was so startling to Amy not due to the apparent callousness of it (in her mother's defence, her shorts were smeared with mud stains from her extended perch with Sheldon), nor, really, its abruptness, occurring the moment she set foot inside the front door. The sun hung low in the sky once more by the time she parted with Sheldon (without even a _hug_) and, surprisingly enough, the house was not dark. Rather, the lights were blazing in a manner that seemed to make it appear not quite as sad as it had been; the hall was bright, illuminated by the ceiling lamps from the adjacent kitchen. That in itself was displaced enough in the Fowler household to warrant Amy's initial trepidation.

No, at any rate, it was the light-hearted lilt to her mother's voice that practically chirped so unnaturally through the house that prompted Amy's double-take, a sound that was so rare about her mother's person that Amy was perfectly justified in doubting it even existed at all. It was perhaps a sad state of affairs that she was immediately suspicious of her own Mom's happiness, but given her prior experiences, it was not exactly unexpected of her.

"What's going on?" Amy probed as she wandered through to the kitchen, brows knitted into a frown.

"It's over, Amy. I did it; I stood up to him."

"To whom?" She knew the answer. As much as Amy would acknowledge it to be entirely ridiculous, she didn't want it to be true. It was irrational, of that she was well aware, and yet at the same time, the thought of being another statistic, another broken home without her father to complete the circle as it were, terrified Amy far more than any thought of tackling his infidelity.

"The rat bastard who had the audacity to call himself a father and a husband."

Mrs. Fowler was wearing lipstick. It only just occurred to Amy, who watched with an expression of unbidden surprise painted to her own mouth - hanging open in a speechless wonder. Her lips were tinted to a violent rouge, slashed like a parenthesis against her face. The animation of her mouth was startling - she shifted so easily from a full-watt grin, much unlike the watery affair that ordinarily featured heavily, to a furious snarl that embodied the steadily mounting animosity towards her husband (apparently no longer a title he could claim in sincerity). Quite frankly, it frightened Amy, not least due to the implications it carried so heavily.

"Where is he? What happened?"

Her mother blanched. "I thought you'd be happy."

"I don't know what to think right now."

This, evidently, was not the correct response. "What is wrong with you? I thought this is what you wanted. What we both wanted - and what's good for us as a family."

"What family?" Amy demanded. She could feel the hot rush of tears swell behind her eyes, but she stoically blinked them away, instead having no choice but to allow her face to flush a violent shade of red as she contained such an influx of feelings as she had never experienced before. "Mom, this— It's just you and me. It's not a family. You said yourself that we can't live like this."

It was unclear as to why her body insisted that she cry so suddenly and so hysterically, but it was putting up such a fight that Amy thought that her legs were perfectly capable of giving way beneath her at any given moment. Her stomach was performing somersaults in a manner that was not at all as pleasant as those she had been experiencing in the company of her ever so charming neighbour (into whose arms she had never quite wanted so badly to fling herself). Prior to that moment, Amy had succeeded in her stubborn refusal to burst into tears, but the moment her own mother conceded to what was apparently a similar compulsion, she was powerless but to follow suit. Like mother, like daughter.

An arm had reached out and pulled her to a bosom that had seemed so far during the past few years of Amy's life. She inhaled deeply, her mother's scent filling her nose like the ghost of something once familiar, and succumbed to the hug. The conflict within her was rife, but the tears were flowing freely and, if the scattered hitch of her mother's breaths were anything to go by, it was a mirrored sentiment.

They stood in such a manner for a while, until Amy's cheeks had dried and she had lost all sense of the time that had passed. She stood there patiently, awaiting the moment that her mother's hold would loosen. It did so after an extended silence, punctured only by sniffling.

"What a mess I am," Mrs. Fowler muttered, dabbing at her eyes, red raw, with the corner of her sleeve. Mascara streamed down her cheeks, but she seemed not to notice.

"Mom, it's okay."

"I didn't know what else to do. He came home with that— that _woman's_ lipstick on his collar and he looked me straight in the eye and— I told him to clear off to her and now look."

Amy didn't say anything for a little while. Her hands had subconsciously rubbed wide circles on her mother's back where they had settled since she had been practically strong-armed into a hug, employing her best, albeit rusty efforts to comfort her. It had been a while since such tables were turned. Precisely what was going to happen from then on was unclear and for once, not knowing was absolutely terrifying.

* * *

><p>For the first time since Amy had arrived in Galveston, rain tumbled from the sky. The heavens had opened some time after than awkward dinner with her mother, a compromise being made via a take-out on their sitting room floor (they had laughed and relaxed and, for the briefest of moments, Amy found herself lulled into the false sense of security that the relationship she shared with her Mom was in any way fully-functioning and seamless). The clouds had unleashed their fury with such an unbidden wrath—fat raindrops that thundered southward and stained asphalt an unforgiving black—that Amy was convinced she subsequently went through a certifiable experience of catharsis.<p>

Such an emotional purging, of sorts, lasted only fleetingly. The pungent smell of the earth after such a heavy rainfall drifted in through her window even while the sky still permitted lashings of rain to fall in thick sheets—petrichor, Amy mused morosely—and, in spite of her sour mood (or perhaps because of it), Amy allowed her torso to dangle out of her open window. The gathered water on her window-sill soaked through her t-shirt, but it was warm and, in a strange war, far more comforting than the bizarre hug that she had received from her mother before she had retired to her own room for an early night.

The gargantuan branches of the oak tree that stretched between her own house and Sheldon's barely sheltered Amy from the weather, but it didn't faze her as much as it ought to have done. Her eyes were screwed shut, taking pleasure from the simple game of attempting to guess where each drop would land next. It cooled her burning cheeks and Amy thought that she could quite easily have hung their until sunrise.

"Amy, that's horrendously dangerous."

Funnily enough, had she been under any immediate hazard of falling, the risk occurred only after the voice drifted up towards her along a slight breeze, carried from ground level with apparent ease. Amy squeaked at such a level that it likely rendered the care that Sheldon had taken in whispering utterly redundant, but the poor girl was far too preoccupied with regaining her footing against her desk back inside her room to pay much attention to any debatable levels of volume.

"Sheldon?" She hissed in return, once it had been established that a stomach-churning drop to her own death was not imminent. "What are you doing here? It's raining!"

"I had gathered," came the stiff response. As though to prove his point, Sheldon raised his sodden arms and shook them, allowing a film of spray to descend.

"Hang on!"

In the ensuing five minutes, Amy dropped back into her bedroom with a finesse significantly comprised by the haste with which she attempted to do so, itself influenced heavily by the eagerness she displayed as she pitched herself down the stairs. Sheldon was already hovering in the porch by the time she inched the door open, ducking his head in what was apparently an attempt to forgo any more rainwater from trickling down his neck. She ushered the soaking boy inside with a small tut of disapproval.

"Mom's asleep," Amy whispered as she led him up the stairs; a glance over her shoulder provided her with an observation of Sheldon's firm nod, proof enough that he would endeavour to be quiet.

"I expected so. In that case, I presume we're heading to your bedroom."

Amy smirked. "Yes. Is there a problem with that?" She was teasing, but the expression on his face indicated that perhaps it wasn't quite so far from the truth.

"Ordinarily, I would object, but given the circumstances—"

"Which are? Wait there." She had guided him to the centre of her room, away from her precious books so that he wouldn't drip water all over them. Amy retreated to find something for Sheldon to dry himself with.

"My mother commented that she saw your father leave with a suitcase and, I quote, "some blonde bimbo" in a car. She proceeded to gossip with my father, one of the few times I've ever witnessed them get along particularly well, but didn't quite do the math, as it were. I did, naturally." Sheldon paused in his account of his personal revelation long enough to accept the towel Amy proffered with a notion of thanks and proceeded to scrub it somewhat viciously through his hair. Consequently, his voice emerged muffled. "I waited until I saw your mother's bedroom light turn off before seeing how you were faring."

For a moment, all Amy could do was blink at Sheldon, eyes widening towards those that inspected her so innocently. Her fingers fell slack against the door-handle, against which they had been resting, and she smiled, albeit a somewhat weak affair. Sheldon continued to look expectantly at her, peering through the folds of the towel that he still clutched to his face. Unthinking, Amy flung herself towards him.

They were both damp, but Sheldon significantly more so and the sodden material of his t-shirt was uncomfortable to her cheeks as she pressed her face to his chest. Regardless, Amy had absolutely no intention of severing the hug. She squeezed tightly and was reassured to note that Sheldon's arms coiled around her in return with only half the amount of reluctance she had expected him to show.

"I'm better now," Amy mumbled to the Superman emblem that adorned much of the shirt. Of course, she mused.

"Better in that you are perfectly happy in your own company?"

"_Better _in that you're here."

"That's what I was afraid of."

Rolling her eyes, Amy snorted and loosened her hold on the poor boy slightly, maintaining the casual loop of her arms around Sheldon's neck as she craned her own to stare him in the eye. He didn't seem too traumatised, which was the main thing, though the quirk of his brow was an expression Amy had yet to place, in spite of its frequency upon Sheldon's face.

"You don't have to be here, you know," she said, raising her own in some semblance of a challenge.

"Missy mentioned that it was non-optional. She is, as they say, "covering" for me."

She couldn't help it; Sheldon literally displayed an impersonation of apostrophes in the air with his fingers, framed by his usual disdainful expression and it promptly succeeded in eliciting the series of watery, muffled chuckles that fell from Amy's lips. She pressed her forehead to his shoulder and didn't reply; her stomach soon ached and her ears rang, but try as she might, her shoulders continued to shudder with the effort of stifling her giggles.

Evidently, Sheldon thought that she had finally gone and crossed the brink to insanity. A gentle pair of hands found the arc of her shoulders and pushed; his face was soon in her own, inspecting it with blatant concern.

"I apologise. I didn't intend to make you cry any more."

"Sheldon," Amy sighed, looking pointedly back. "You didn't. You— I'm not crying. Not any more. I'm okay, I think." Another heavy breath left her throat. She had overcome her giggling fit, at least, and permitted it advisable, finally, to let go of Sheldon, resting back on her heels. "But did you come here because your sister told you to, or because you wanted to?"

The question almost seemed to pain Sheldon to consider. It didn't fill Amy with a lot of faith, to be perfectly honest, but he was speaking again and she was hanging onto his every world regardless. "I couldn't sleep because I was concerned for you. I suppose it was the latter, although Missy can be very convincing when she wants to— _Oh._"

With a firm prod to his chest, Amy had directed Sheldon to sit on the bed, the backs of his calves banging roughly against the metal frame, and he looked up at her very much like a deer trapped in headlights. She wanted to kiss him again, to cup his face with grateful hands and allow her fingers to trail back through that baby-soft hair, but there was something far more poignant about doing so in her own bedroom and Amy couldn't quite bring herself to do so. Instead, she settled down beside him, drawing her knees to her chest, and allowing ample room with which Sheldon was able to retreat to his own comfort zone if he so required it.

Rather than take her up on such an offer, he inched closer and reached out with tentative fingertips that finally came to a rest on her forearm. Amy looked curiously to him; apparently nervous (a novelty in itself), his teeth had sunk to his lower lip.

"She suggested that I stay for a while."

Amy felt her heart skip a beat. "The night."

The mattress beneath her rose and fell ever so slightly as Sheldon shifted, his gaze directed to his lap as though to look anywhere else was to further invite such a peculiar arrangement. "Perhaps."

"Sheldon, the spare room is still full of junk from moving. I have a sleeping bag in my closet if—"

"But my _back_."

"You aren't sixty."

"I might as well be, if I spend a night on the floor."

"Well, the only other alternative is—"

Oh, dear. Swallowing, Amy glanced to the bed they sat upon, sparing the glance when she thought that Sheldon might have remained far too intimidated by the prospect of it to even consider looking at the offending item. Naturally, she was wrong. Their line of vision seemed to clash as they observed the bed; it was too large to pass for a twin, but it was hardly a full-sized double, either. In her lap, Amy entwined her fingers together and looked expectantly at Sheldon. He let out a low breath.

"I suppose one night wouldn't do any harm."

Frankly, Amy wouldn't have minded in the slightest if it had, because ten minutes later found the pair of them lying there side by side, faces to the ceiling. She was conscious of keeping her limbs to herself, because Sheldon still didn't seem particularly comfortable with the entire debacle, but despite her best efforts, they were close enough that Amy could hear his breathing in perfect clarity, a rapid affair that informed her of Sheldon's apparent sleeplessness. She turned to her side, facing him with curiosity.

"You sound like you're about to take off."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your breathing. Calm down. This isn't so bad, is it?"

In the darkness, a pressing blackness that was broken only by the pale glow of the moon, Amy watched as Sheldon opened his eyes. They swivelled to her, eyebrows raised, and then he too turned, clutching the covers to his chest as he caught her eye.

"I used to share a bed with Missy," Sheldon confessed, notably dodging the real question. "Before we grew up and it was more of an inconvenience. She used to shuffle a lot and kick me in her sleep."

"I promise I won't kick you."

"I appreciate the sentiment—" He smiled sleepily and closed his eyes. "—but it wouldn't help. It's an automatism, like sleepwalking." Sheldon yawned. "Goodnight, Amy."

"Goodnight, Sheldon."

_The angels never arrived, but I can hear the choir  
><em>_So will someone come and carry me home tonight?_  
>- fun; We Are Young<p> 


	7. The MaryJesus Quagmire

**A/N: Thank you again for those who review/favourite/etc. I love youuu all. It makes me sort of sad when I realise there isn't much left to this D: If you've stuck around this long, extra love for you :3 **

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><p><em>There's no telling where we'll be in a day or in a week,<br>And there's no promises of peace or of happiness.  
><em>

When Amy awoke the next morning, it was to the pleasant, albeit foreign sensation of her face buried against a chest. It was slight and rather bony, not quite the rippling muscles that featured in her romance novels, but its steady rise and fall was solid and comforting. She inhaled deeply. The unmistakable odour of baby powder filled her nostrils, a childish yet reassuring affair that promoted irrefutably cleanliness. It seemed to billow in Amy's lungs like a hot-air balloon, displacing her fleeting surprise that she had shared a bed with anyone and replacing it instead with pure happiness. She grinned into the material that tickled her nose.

As she shifted slightly, eyes still screwed tightly shut in an ongoing effort to maintain a hold on the feeling, there was a soft grunt above her. A chin was resting upon her tangled hair and it was at that point that Amy suddenly became very much aware of the body connected to said chest. Sheldon was apparently not yet fully awake, despite the indication that he was very groggily coming to and Amy decided that it was a revelation she was going to take full advantage of. Evidently, a restless sleep was vested heavily in the Cooper genetic make-up; his head had shifted to her pillow and, in inching closer, their legs were entangled. With a gentle exploration, Amy discerned that the tips of her toes only just reached his calves, the surface of which scratched her feet with a signal of puberty that so contradicted Sheldon's aroma of talc that she felt it necessary to trail her toes just a little further.

There was a pressure slung along her waist that tightened suddenly as Amy did so and she realised with a jolt that they were effectively snuggling: it was Sheldon's arm, gangly as it was, and her own nudged his when a slight shift on her part confirmed that her fingers were splayed against his chest. Amy was entirely certain by that point that she looked like a complete and utter loon; she was still grinning widely, utterly content as they lay there in the morning sunlight.

She seemed liable to drift off into a doze once more, were it not for the throat that was cleared above her. Sheldon uttered her name, almost as though in greeting. His voice was deeper than usual, still sleepy, and Amy waited a beat before lifting her head. They were barely inches apart—she could have kissed him there and then, had she been so inclined—but she did nothing but smile that bleary, blissful smile at him.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Yes, thank you. Your mattress is surprisingly firm. I must apologise, though, for—" Sheldon removed his arm and folded it against his chest. As an irrational chill swept across his hips, the warmth moving swiftly to her hands (upon which his own rested), Amy blinked at him, curious as to whether or not he realised where his arm had landed prior to his sudden extraction of it.

"It's okay," she whispered, rearranging their fingers to little protest from Sheldon so that they were entwined. "It's nice."

Sheldon appeared as though he had been about to protest or at least say _something_, mouth ajar and a slight frown creasing his forehead, but Amy never did discover what had been poised on the tip of her tongue, for the voice that suddenly ripped through the serenity of her bedroom was so unforgiving that the words were torn from his lips entirely.

"AMY!"

She jumped so violently that poor Sheldon ended up with a swift kick to the shin. In her haste to fling herself out of the bed, however, Amy barely acknowledged the short grunt he responded with and instead found herself flailing over the edge, dragging the covers along with her. She landed with a resounding crash that prompted another set of frantic footsteps to thunder across the hallway. Amy, being far too busy nursing her battle wounds and attempting to avoid her mother's gaze, didn't acknowledge the owner of them, currently hovering over Mrs. Fowler's shoulder and seething, until Sheldon began to squawk.

"_Mother? _What are you doing here?"

"Sheldon Lee Cooper, I never thought I'd see the day that my son would be living in sin! I expected it of Junior and maybe even, heaven forbid, Missy, but _Shelly? _Why would you do this to your own mother?" Poor "Shelly" had, by that point, clambered to his feet, helped Amy to her own and was now doing his utmost to get a leg-in on the conversation, but his mother seemed hell-bent on ensuring that did not transpire. She barrelled onwards with her onslaught: "Never in all my years did I think..."

The party had progressed to their staircase by that point, Amy trailing reluctantly behind and bringing up the rear with Sheldon, who was hopping along just a step in front as he struggled to wrestle his way into his remaining shoe. The very much one-sided bickering continued without relent all the way to the front door, in the vicinity of which a showdown of sorts transpired. Amy's mother had put up a somewhat valiant attempt to inject her own influence into the conversation, which had been shot down by an equally unperturbed display by one Mary Cooper. The latter had succeeded in simultaneously alienating and intimidating every single one of them.

"But _Mom_, Missy said—"

"Don't you bring your sister into this, Shelly. She might not have a fancy degree, but she's got brains enough not to bring such _shame _to the family. Of all the people..."

"But it's not like that, I—"

"I don't wanna hear it. You get yourself into that house and just be glad your Daddy ain't home."

That seemed to do it; Amy watched as Sheldon's cheeks paled to such a pallor that she half-expected him to collapse right there upon her doorstep. He trooped dutifully on without a hitch, daring a swift wave over his shoulder towards Amy herself before he was steered definitely out of the door and across the wilting lawn to the neighbouring household - out of Amy's reach. She watched as he was all but frog-marched into the distance, still very much in shock at the haste with which everything had surrendered to chaos; it was a reaction that she might have preferred, Amy would later reflect, compared to the frosty and very much awkward silence bestowed upon her by her own mother. Uncomfortable was an understatement.

* * *

><p>For the first time in her life, Amy Farrah Fowler found herself grounded. The novelty of it had lasted longer than expected—a grand total of three hours, all the way up until the point at which her mother swept out of the house—though the point at which it wore off was rather abrupt and very much unexpected. Its sudden evacuation of her thoughts, so awhirl with what was primarily the mere prospect that anyone had considered Sheldon and herself doing <em>that<em>, had startled Amy in a manner that rendered her apparently helpless. She was consumed by a sort of crippling boredom that was entirely irrational, given the mountain upon mountain of books that dominated much of her room in soaring peaks and dramatic troughs. None of them seemed to assist her cause.

In a display of such helplessness, Amy was sprawled upon her bedroom floor as though doing so with her cheek pressed to the fibres of her carpet would ultimately reveal the answers to life, the universe and everything. The Douglas Adams omnibus, of sorts, itself lay within the crook of her neck, each corner of the pages tickling her throat in a way that was borderline uncomfortable, and yet she couldn't bring herself to move. She had waded her way through a few pages (42, oddly enough), something of an achievement given her inclination to fling things off into the distance in her current shoddy mood, but now even that was beginning to fail her.

A heavy sigh left her lips, one that drew Amy's chest up and out with such conviction that it ached afterwards, in something of a disgustingly appropriate metaphor for the current tide of emotion that had washed over her. There was such an amalgamation swimming through her that she wasn't entirely sure which to allow to seep through, if only given that Amy couldn't pinpoint any of them. She screwed her eyes tightly shut and attempted to pigeon-hole them, breathing deeply, but a slam from somewhere below blew it all out of the water in a single blow.

In retrospect, Amy had heard the key scratching at the front door, but had not acknowledged it, and so the haste with which she leapt to her feet was not entirely unjustified. Against her chest, her heart pounded a rapid tattoo, so quick and so strong that it seemed to echo through her ears as the blood roared.

Heavy footsteps follow, solid and definite, and Amy's head seemed to swim as she convinced herself that there was an intruder. It wasn't her mother, at least, and thus concluded the list of viable visitors the Fowler household might possibly have procured in Galveston.

Somewhere between her tentative exit from her bedroom, Amy's hands had found the gargantuan tome that was the library's Complete Works of Shakespeare and she brandished it almost like a weapon, out from her chest as though the prose would banish those footsteps from progressing any closer. It was Amy's only option, given the tremble that her legs had suddenly adopted as she inched down the stairs. She was almost entirely certain that she was poised to tumble down the stairs.

There was a curse and Amy held her breath, because the voice was heading closer and she knew that, sooner rather than later, she would be busted. Her legs had momentarily stopped functioning or rather, they existed on a level detached from her conscious thought.

"Amy?"

The word sounded so close to her that, for a moment, Amy didn't acknowledge any of its meaning. She jumped and had little choice but to drop her book and grasp at the banister for balance. As the pages tumbled down the stairs like some kind of Slinky, she almost felt sorry for them, but, as they fell to the feet of the new presence in the household, Amy's concern drifted somewhat to that of the identity of said feet.

"Dad!"

The surprise that she felt at not only seeing her father but having not recognised the cadence of his voice (thereby being so ridiculously terrified) effectively dwarfed any animosity that Amy might have ordinarily felt towards him. For some strange reasoning unbeknownst to her, Amy could not shake the awful feeling of her revelation that she had already shut her own father from her life, to such an extent that his was a presence she had difficulty recognising.

"What are you doing here?" She continued warily, still teetering halfway up the staircase. Her grip on the banister remained ever tight; Amy had never felt quite as liable to be betrayed by her own legs and therefore crumble. "Mom said—"

"Your mother says a lot of things. Doesn't mean most of them."

Amy glared. "I don't think that's applicable this time."

Her father's expression so easily and so readily made the transition from surprise to antagonised that Amy immediately regretted the statement. She felt as though she were nine years old again, simultaneously admiring and fearing her father, that mysterious entity, whose scratchy cheek as he kissed her goodnight was the only familiar touch she knew. But somewhere at the back of her mind, Amy had already taken her mother's side—and quite rightly so—and she maintained her steady disapproval of her Dad.

He sighed, more out of exasperation than anything, as though he couldn't quite see the point in explaining himself numerous times to the females of the family he had effectively abandoned. Amy felt yet another surge of irritation. "We all make mistakes, Amy. Your Mom isn't as perfect as she likes to think. None of us are."

"So this was all an accident? That hickey— you were abducted by aliens, right?"

"Don't be a smart-mouth; it never suited you."

"Nor did being a Dad ever fit you."

They perhaps weren't advisable, those words that slipped so easily from Amy's mouth, but they had apparently lingered just beneath the surface for so long, having been smothered with such conviction, that she found it a task to control them. Her father took a step forward, as though he had intended to do something about it on her behalf, but he seemed to have mastered that particular art of self-control far more than Amy had and paused with his fingers curled to a fist around the end of the banister.

It was only then that Amy noticed the duffle bag at his feet. It seemed to be brimming with various belongings—the sleeve of a jacket dangled freely where one zip didn't quite meet its counter-part—and it spoke volumes. She glanced between the bag and her father, eyebrows raised in a questioning expression that Amy fully acknowledged had been derived from Sheldon.

Her father scowled. "I'm here for the rest of my things. I wasn't exactly given enough time to get "my sorry ass" out of here quick enough yesterday. Your Mom's lethal with a hairdryer."

The swell of pride for her mother, in spite of the residual annoyance upon being grounded, that Amy felt was comforting when contrasted with the icy wake of her father.

"Don't let me of all people keep you."

"Amy, don't be like this. I'm still your father, however much you resent that. You're stuck with me."

"I think Mom made it pretty clear that we don't have to be lumbered with you anymore." Amy took a rather bold step forward, primarily to rescue her book from the foot of the staircase. "Please, just go away."

For a moment, Amy thought that the flash in her father's eyes upon being faced with something of a beg by his only daughter might have passed for guilt and, had it lingered there any longer, then she certainly could have believed it. Indeed, she might well have taken pity on her Dad, who seemed more than a little rough around the edges. As it happened, the man did little to help himself. It had vanished almost as quickly as it had apparently appeared, flitting off into the darkness of his brown eyes that Amy could not at all recall seeing warmth in. He grabbed his belongings and turned on his heel.

There was a beat of silence, punctured only by passing cars and the detached song of birds, such an antithesis to the current mood of the house, but then Amy couldn't help herself and she all but leapt to the front door, leaning out with her bare feet curled around the frame. If she squinted, battling against the glare of the sun even against the poor paint-work of his car, she could see the slump of her father against the wheel, struggling to put the old vehicle into gear. And then, with a cough of exhaust and a rev of the engine, he was off. Amy hovered there in the doorway and watched stoically as he progressed down the road.

_So long and thanks for all the fish. _

Oddly enough, Amy wasn't at all sad that it should come to this.

* * *

><p>"Amy, I'm not allowed to see you anymore."<p>

It was that declaration some hours later, after the sun had set and a cool breeze had crept through the streets of the suburbs, that prompted a real lead weight to plummet through Amy's stomach. It didn't make sense and the meek nature to Sheldon's tone comforted her in its apparent reluctance to even consider the thought that his very own statement was vested in the truth. Unfortunately, this did little to fend off the swell of panic that inflated within Amy quite startlingly.

Since her father's car had turned the corner, apparently never to return, Amy had existed in a somewhat bizarre state that she couldn't quite discern, but had every reason to believe was shock. She had been afflicted with the same restlessness that plagued her summer prior to that kiss in the forest, something that seemed such a lifetime behind her that Amy's spirits wilted a little just to consider it.

Sheldon's eyes were screwed tightly shut now, as though taking what Amy could only assume (perfectly justified, however) was his mother's influence quite seriously in that he was refusing to even look at her. She couldn't help herself; Amy smiled in spite of the apparent gravity of the situation. Her fingertips reached out and brushed his arm.

"That's unfortunate. I like seeing you."

As her hand settled against his sleeve, Sheldon's eyes had fluttered open with little reluctance and the way he looked at her then made Amy practically melt, not out of some sappy adoration, but for the silent concurrence with her that he too liked her company. He rocked on his heels and dared a quick glance to his right, to his house, as though even standing on Amy's doorstep was a potentially life-threatening foray.

"My Mom said you're a bad influence," Sheldon explained apologetically. "I informed her how wrong she was, but she wasn't having any of it."

"Thank you for defending my honour."

He beamed in spite of himself, apparently taking Amy's words quite seriously. Really, she ought not to have been surprised. "You're quite welcome. However, I'm afraid I must go. Mom will be home soon and I really do not trust my sister to divert her suspicions again."

"Don't I get any say in this?"

"Not unless you want to suffer the wrath of the unbeatable combination that is my mother and Jesus."

Amy giggled and she knew that the slight quirk of Sheldon's lips indicated that it was his attempt at humour and therefore it was perfectly fine to do so. There were such little things like that, she mused, that solidified her closeness to Sheldon, for Amy felt as though she were the only other person in the world fluent enough in these idiosyncrasies to decipher the enigma, of sorts, that was Sheldon Cooper. As such, her almost coy approach to picking him apart right there and then was not entirely vested in nothing more than Amy's experience of romance novels.

"But I'm too used to your company," she protested, almost slyly. "Without you, I'll be spending all of my summer with Sarah."

Predictably, Sheldon did not react well to the revelation. "I suppose that is unfortunate." He bristled. "But I cannot lie to a stranger, much less my mother. You know that, Amy."

"Maybe you wouldn't have to lie," Amy ventured, taking a small step forward, "not if we find a way around it."

"We can talk through our windows, like the other week. That worked."

Amy remained insistent. "But it's better in person; there are some things you can't do via sign language."

"What on earth are you—"

In what was becoming an increasingly similar vein to prior experiences in their relationship, Amy promptly cut Sheldon off by pressing her lips to his, effectively barricading his words back in with a kiss. The ease with which he responded this time, however, was indicative, Amy decided, that he had been vying for such a response all along, ever since he had elected to defy Mrs. Cooper (and Jesus, who was only marginally less intimidating than Sheldon's mother) or, perhaps, since her foot had trailed along his leg that morning.

Her arms seemed to settle so naturally around his shoulders that she automatically felt stupid for allowing her thoughts to wander to the revelation, but then Sheldon's fingers had ventured almost tentatively to her waist again and Amy threw rational thought to the wind. She felt as though gravity had failed them both and they might be liable to drift apart at any given moment, but Sheldon had plucked up the courage to wind his arms around her waist more definitively and, somehow, her back fell to the wooden frame of her front door as they kissed.

Amy didn't know how much time had passed, but, from her reluctance to descend any further into cliché, she refrained from dedicating much thought to it. At any rate, much of it was dedicated towards the conviction required to push Sheldon away, reluctantly shifting her head.

"Sheldon," she breathed, palms to his cheeks as she forced him to look her in the eye. "Sheldon, what is this?"

"Most cultures accept a kiss to another person's lips as a common expression of affection—"

"No, _this_, us. Is it— are we—?"

"Amy, your sudden descent into an apparently illiterate nature, judging by your propensity for fragmented statements, is baffling."

With fistfuls of his shirt, Amy silenced him with another kiss.

_Oh its time to let go of everything you use to know  
>Ideas that strengthen who we've been<br>__It's time to cut ties that won't ever free our minds  
>From the chains and shackles that they're in.<br>_- Patrick Park; Life Is A Song


	8. The Heidelberg Interruption

**A/N: I'm so sorry that this took longer than usual! Hopefully the fact that it's stupidly long makes up for it ;) As always, your reviews/feedback are lovely and very appreciated! This is sort of like the penultimate chapter, if you don't count the epilogue I may or may not have planned. (Amy's mild obsession with Joan Jett is brought to you by my unabashed girl!crush on the woman.) And yes, I have just reuploaded this chapter. Hopefully it works now!  
><strong>

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><p><em>We've been here too long,<br>Trying to get along,  
>Pretending that you're oh so shy.<br>_

Two weeks passed, spent as though operating some covert operation under the cover of the library, before either Sheldon or Amy—it was unclear as to who rather boldly suggested the first step, but given that they had both been firm advocates of the idea, such discrepancies were dubious, at best—plucked up the courage to brave their own homes in one anothers company again.

The interval between then and, well, now, had been uncertain, yes, but Amy felt as though they operated on a far more solid platform than the first time she had kissed him. Her evidence consisted primarily of the simple revelation that their spot in the very belly of the library, crouched behind that damn Shakespeare tome (it had seen so much that summer that Amy was reluctant to return it), had marked the first instance of a Sheldon-initiated kiss. Amy, quite understandably, had spent much of the afternoon attempting to corral him into giving her another.

Their congregations weren't as frequent nor as lengthy as the beginning of the summer had boasted, but they were far more poignant and the penchant that Amy's heart had suddenly developed for jumping to her chest whenever she saw him approaching—she sat with her nose pressed to her bedroom window and watched avidly as Sheldon left his bedroom—was quite the potent indication of her infatuation.

Mrs. Cooper had evacuated her home just long enough—church meeting—for Sheldon to leave its confines in order to slip in what they both hoped was quite the surreptitious manner to Amy's house. After the debacle of last time, Missy had been notably left out of the arrangement.

This marked the third time in a week that they had managed the manoeuvre, disregarding one ill-fated attempt at climbing the tree between their respective windows. After that, they'd elected to use the front door, quite wisely, but the arrangement was such a farcical affair—they'd communicated probability and angle of approach and exactly how likely it was that Jesus would inform his mother of their blatant disregard for her word—that, by the time they all but fell into Amy's room, a good ten minutes or so had passed.

Sheldon had protested against it, but Amy, in her bid to make more female friends, had taken to scouring the radio channels in search of a shared interest to talk about. The result was an ear partial to Joan Jett, who urged Amy in her seductive growl not to give a damn about her bad reputation. The same morning, Amy found herself compelled to snitch on one of her peers for stealing. It perhaps wasn't quite what her new idol had harboured in her mind when penning such lyrics, but the defiance appealed to Amy, the girl who had strove for so long to please others and, besides, she really didn't like the boy-bands over whom the other girls swooned, anyway.

Naturally, Sheldon hadn't been impressed and, by the time Amy whacked him in the face with a pillow (effectively squashing any ill-advised attempts to commandeer any and all control of the cassette player), she recorded three separate, valiant attempts to replace the tape with a copy of some lecture he had attended prior to that summer.

"I don't understand why you enjoy this music," he confessed after his final effort resulted in nothing more than a brief wrestle between the pair. They sat now upon Amy's bed, backs against the wall, legs dangling over the edge and limbs comfortably entangled. Amy was conscious of his thigh between hers, his long fingers coiled around her wrist and her heartbeat reverberating between them. "She has no discernible talent."

That, naturally, earned him another wallop.

"Would you rather I listen to Mariah Carey?"

Sheldon scrunched up his nose in plain distaste. "Missy has an unfortunate infatuation with that woman. I genuinely don't see the appeal, except, perhaps, for the fact that her features are aesthetically pleasing."

"You think she's hot."

"I didn't say that," he sighed, fixing Amy with the very same glower—withering, condescending, but so amusing—that she consistently strove to elicit. It comforted her that, above all, some reactions never altered. "However, as you yourself seem to be enamoured with this— this woman-" Sheldon waved his arm vaguely towards Amy's stereo. "-to such an extent that you would defile your nails with that polish, you seem to subscribe, like Missy, to the physical appeal as opposed to any inherent fascination with the quality of her music."

Amy's cheeks burned. "It's not like that_. _I like her music - what she stands for. I mean, she doesn't encourage the dogma that you need a nice ass and big boobs to succeed as a woman."

It was Sheldon's turn to blush violently and he did so promptly, clearing his throat with vigour and removing his fingers from Amy's wrist. "I still don't like her. It's _vulgar _and you'll like this lecture. It's Kendall and Friedman, talking about the inelastic scattering—the up and down quarks—and how it proves the existence of gluons."

"The— _what?_"

"Gauge bosons? The force between quarks?" Sheldon looked scandalised. "Really, Amy, I told you this music would rot your brain."

Amy blinked; he was spouting what sounded like utter nonsense. She could list every bone in the human body and its functions, but particles and physics and whatever Sheldon gushed so frequently over danced straight over her head, almost patronising. In the spirit of friendship, she would endeavour to keep up and had, on more than one occasion, raided the library for information, but for every boson that she committed to memory, every group theory and colour charge and superposition that set up camp in her thoughts, Sheldon seemed to bypass all of this entirely with maddening ease.

"Sheldon, it's physics," she stated, as though that would explain the facial expression that she had evidently adopted from Sheldon's siblings. "I'm a biologist. Well, I want to be."

"Have you informed your mother of this, yet? She seems to be ever adamant that you intend to become a doctor."

The statement was nothing new to Amy, who had long since foregone any and all attempts to battle her way through her mother's obstinate nature in order to suggest that perhaps she might like to consider other fields of study. There had been a time, quite significantly in the past, when Amy had been far braver in the face of her parents than she currently boasted, prompting various enthusiastic attempts at discussing a profession other than dealing with sick people, which required a degree of patience that Amy could not claim for her own.

"No," she sighed now, averting her eyes in mild shame. "I had been hoping to put it off for as long as possible. I can't bring myself to do it right now, not after Dad and— and everything. It's easier to talk to you about it."

Sheldon's fingertips had reclaimed a spot on her arm once more, in a development that Amy was fairly certain remained entirely unconscious, and described lazy patterns in what she might have construed as mere scribbles, had it not been, well, Sheldon, who, even absently, never did anything at random. Knowing him, they would be equations, symbols, markings. Amy had long since trashed any efforts at discerning precisely what they were.

It elicited goosebumps and, for the briefest of moments, all was silent. Even Joan Jett had grown quiet, her voice replaced by the scratching of the tape as it ended. Curiously, Amy searched for Sheldon's gaze and saw a rare semblance of worry there.

"What's wrong?"

"You know I won't be able to talk with you for much longer, at least not for a while and not properly."

And just like that, Amy felt her world begin to slip from her fingertips.

"What do you mean?" She dared to ask, detaching herself slightly and staring at poor Sheldon, who looked very much like he would have sooner sunk into the pits of Hell itself than endure their current conversation. She probed: "Sheldon?"

"I'm going to Germany," he blurted.

"Oh."

It was the only coherent noise that Amy, rendered speechless, could construct. Surprise had prompted her brief submission to confusion, though it was not merely the revelation, apparently out of the blue, that did so. Her thoughts conjured some vague recollection of a similar conversation, one in which Sheldon had revealed his plans after the summer, but it was so detached from their current relationship that, for some strange, inexplicable reason, Amy reflected that she had been of the belief that things might have changed since then.

It was stupid and yet she didn't begrudge either herself or Sheldon for it. There was a fleeting rush of despair, cold and jarring, but then the pressure of Sheldon's shoulder had returned to hers and Amy realised that he'd traversed his usual aversion to excessive contact in order to tug her into a hug, albeit an awkward one. She was accosted with such a startling feeling—the beginning of the end—that Amy wanted nothing more than to curl up right there and never venture out into the real world again.

* * *

><p>"I can't believe he's leaving you and you're just letting it happen."<p>

Not for the first time that summer, the markedly significant events that passed between Amy and Sheldon—hours of thought were dedicated to those snapshots in their lives on Amy's part; Sheldon could not claim to be quite as intuitive as she, in something of a complete antithesis to his usual obsessive bouts of thought—was promptly recounting to Sarah, who had a penchant for commenting on them with a sort of indefatigable and very much unrivalled wisdom that the girl, for no discernible reason (Sheldon had theorised that there was something suspicious going on when it had cropped up in a bizarre conversation between he and Amy, maintaining that something clandestine was afoot), seemed to posit whenever faced with that sort of thing.

It was strange, for lack of any better word, because Sarah's image was one that had been painstakingly crafted upon apathy. It had been something of an anathema to Amy initially, though she had come to envy her friend it to such an extent that even her attempts to mirror it were mired in such a myriad of incorrections, crafted so by her rose-tinted skew of Sarah, as it were.

There were the chewed black nails and then that wild array of curls that Amy herself could picture even when separated by several miles and the web of telephone lines currently attached, albeit not quite _vis a vis_, to her ear.

Amy sat with the home phone anchored there by her bare shoulder, modesty shielded by a flimsy tank-top, an array that remained fleetingly acceptable only by both the sweltering weather that still hung so heavily (September was approaching rapidly and yet the sun still lingered, evidently employing a last-ditch effort to neutralise the entire populace of Texas) and then the privacy of her bedroom. Her palms, slick with sweat, had been rendered momentarily ineffective in her bid to keep Sarah's voice within ear-shot - and by the wet paint that coated her nails.

Three shades had been painted and then eradicated, quite without mercy, charting Amy's ever-growing indecisiveness. She had turned her nose up at the bright pink favoured by Missy (Sheldon had imparted that particular slither of information when inspecting their entwined fingers with his usual scientific curiosity) and bypassed Sarah's black entirely (it was to be shared only by her friend and her beloved Joan Jett, both of whom being women whose souls she longed to possess and yet could only desire). In the end, she settled on some kind of middle ground—the label declared it to be mushroom—and Amy felt comfortably average brandishing it.

And yet, on a deeper level, the somewhat monotonous task of passing from one nail to the next offered Amy the perfect platform from which to organise her thoughts, to lay them out side by side and request that they arrange themselves in a manner that was far easier to record than their current jumble. She had rung Sarah with such intentions, though, as per usual (and rather helpfully, in quite the predictable manner, ceding to the utter uselessness in Amy's attempts to scapegoat), she successfully managed to raise far more enquiries than answers.

"It's not as easy as that," Amy sighed now, tentatively brushing the paint over a toe-nail in yet another brave exploration. "I can't take this away from him. I mean, he told me I just... forgot."

The meek confession evidently did not impress Sarah. "But that was before you attacked him with your lips." She spoke as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, as though Amy's common sense had traversed her intelligence and failed her. Amy could only wish it was so easy.

"That doesn't change anything. Frankly, even I would choose Heidelberg over Sheldon."

"You two really need to sort out your priorities."

"Sarah, he's a scientist, not a hopeless romantic pulled straight out of a book. He's only just stopped asking when I last cleaned my teeth whenever we kiss."

The snort on the other end of the line confirmed the ridiculousness of such an enquiry. It was reassuring, Amy noted, to not be the only one who considered the statement a little off-putting. "He can be a scientist in Texas."

"This is going in circles."

"Frankly, it's better than standing around and letting him run off to Bavaria."

"Heidelberg is in Baden-Württemberg, not—"

"Like that matters. You _are _going to write to him though, aren't you?"

It felt like a masked imperative, more than anything, and had the conversation took place at the start of the summer, then Amy would have allowed herself to be cajoled into anything by that discreet sense of rhetoric. She would write, of course; they'd even discussed the negotiation of the extortionate phone bills and flights out to Europe. And yet, in principle, Amy bristled at the covert attempt to tell her exactly what to do.

"Of course. I don't think it'll be the same, though. I just like _talking _to him. Every thing makes more sense when he says it. It's like there's some weird clarity to everything he says. Without him, there's no one really to talk to."

"Uh, Ames, what are we doing right now?"

"This is- it's just different. I mean, I could never have a conversation like this with Sheldon. but do you really want to listen to me go on about biology for an hour? Because, really, I can." Rather helpfully, Sarah elected to impersonate a particularly heavy snore on her end of the line. "He hates biology, but he understands. He's the only one who does. We'd been talking about looking at colleges together - for me. I mean, he's been through it all before. And my Mom could go crazy if she found out that I don't want to go into medicine."

"So, what, you're going to live this whole lie to your own mother? I'm all for this weird new rebellious side you've found, but that's not exactly the kind of secret you can stick in your closet and hope never comes up over dinner."

"I can try."

"Amy, you have to say something. She's your Mom. They're supposed to support you and... stuff. Through thick and thin."

"You clearly haven't met mine."

"Oh, come on, just try. You won't know if you don't ask. Maybe she'll be different after what happened with- you know, after your Dad."

Amy sincerely doubted it, but later, when she hung up her end of the line, it was with the promise that she would at least attempt it.

The ensuing wait for her mother to return home from work felt to be amongst the longest that Amy had ever endured. She finished her nails, rather proud of the effort in that it had only once departed from her nails to the tips of her fingers. In the spirit of their prior conversation (and that their time was ever limited, of which she was increasingly aware with each moment spent apart), Amy salvaged the lecture that Sheldon had surreptitiously left behind from beneath the array of books on her desk and began to trek her way through it, pausing only very briefly to look various concepts up in an encyclopaedia.

She'd only just managed to fully understand the concept when the slam of the front door alerted her to the moment of Judgement, as it were. Amy jumped. She hadn't even heard her mother's car in the driveway.

Shuffling uncertainly downstairs, Amy charted the slow but sure descent of her mother's tension as she discarded any and all reminders of the work day; her daughter righted Mrs. Fowler's coat, slung in a state of entropy at the foot of the stairs, and progressed somewhat uncertainly to the kitchen, where the cheerful ring of metal against porcelain signalled the preparation of tea. It was there, in the doorway with her hip canted against the frame, that Amy stood her ground and where the battle would ultimately take place.

"Mom, can I talk to you?"

Her mother glanced up briefly. "Hello, Amy. Will it take long? My evening class is tonight."

That, Amy would come to note, was the last moment at which she could have made her escape. She toyed with the thought of it, rocking back and forth uncertainly on her heels. Behind her back, she wrung her her fingers together, tangling them within one another as though to provide a distraction from what Amy was certain would be impending disaster.

"I just need to tell you that— don't get mad. Please, just hear me out and it's not—"

"Amy!" Her mother snapped, whirling to accost her daughter with a sharp glance. "Out with it!"

"I don't want to study medicine."

There was a frosty silence, shattered by the groan of appliances, and Amy wasn't entirely certain whether or not her Mom had managed to make any sense whatsoever of the declaration. She opened her mouth; it hung ajar as she opted to probe further, but no coherent noise escaped. Had she possessed any intention of doing so, Amy sincerely doubted it would have made much sense; her stomach had constricted uncomfortably, performing somersaults in a most unfortunate manner.

"We've had these plans since you were a child, Amy," Mrs. Fowler finally managed, cheeks pink with the exertion of containing herself. "What on earth has come over you?"

"I never wanted to," she gushed now, taking a step forward with fists clenched at either side of her body. Amy's fingernails dug small, half-moon indents into the palms of her hand, a slight ache flickering there, but she ignored it and pressed on. "I don't want to become a doctor; I like theory, not poking around diseased people."

"Amy, I really don't want to talk about this right now."

"When, then? Mom, you never want to talk. No one talks about anything in this house," Amy retorted. She knew her mother's patience was wearing thin—it was evident in the strain behind her voice—but, if anything, it only seemed to foil her vehemence.

"Amy, what on earth is wrong with you lately? Ever since we moved here, you've been changing. What happened to the old Amy?" _You mean the one who allowed you to walk all over her? _"It's that boy, isn't it? That Cooper. Perhaps Mary was wrong and _he's _the bad influence."

"This has nothing to do with Sheldon! I've never wanted any of this; it was always you!"

"And you never had a bad word to say of any of it. Years we've been talking of this, Amy, and never once have I heard anything against it."

It was like speaking to a brick wall, one that not only prompted Amy's words to hurtled right back towards her with a vengeance, but that bit back with such an icy tone that it seemed to pierce her right to the core. Her path was blocked by both its obstinate barrier before her and a reluctance to relent that prohibited Amy from turning back.

"I tried! You never listen!"

"Amy, we're not having this conversation right now—"

Voices were raising, pitched towards the heavens as though an excess in volume might well lend itself to some kind of progress in either argument - it didn't, naturally.

"Mom, you can't just keep hiding from these things. Every time things don't go the way you planned it, you just turn your back on it. You did exactly the same with Dad."

It was a step too far and Amy knew it, but pragmatism had long since decreed it to be the only effective method of getting through to her mother. Like mother, like daughter; they were both stubborn and to continue the discussion was pointless, but Amy had existed for so long in the unforgiving shadow that her mother left behind in her wake that she found the spotlight to be oddly comforting.

"Amy, get out of my sight."

Still, she gladly turned on her heels and fled.

* * *

><p>That night, Amy was the first of Sheldon and herself to tackle the oak tree that stretched up between them. Branches dragged against bare skin, describing vicious slashes of red against her milky skin, and her shins were made red-raw by the bark that she scrabbled to maintain a grip on, but, somehow, she made it. She paused for a moment at the top, resting her shoulder against the wall beside Sheldon's window as she perched upon the branch somewhat precariously, before her knuckles rapped against the glass, uncertain but firm.<p>

Sheldon appeared in a heart-beat, eyes gaping in a degree of surprise that he made utterly no attempt to disguise. His voice came to her through the glass as though underwater, a murky enquiry of her name that was repeated in a wonderful clarity, assuring Amy that she had made it in one piece, when the window was slid upwards.

"I'm assuming that you have a death wish, as otherwise there's no conceivable reason for you to be clambering up to my window like this."

"Sheldon, please, help me up," Amy breathed, tentatively reaching out with one hand. Her fingers stretched towards him, hopefully. "Mom and I had an argument. I don't want to be there right now."

His expression was quizzical, but Sheldon laced their fingers firmly together and tugged sharply. Her legs dragged against rogue branches for what must have been the umpteenth time, skinning them no doubt, and for the briefest of moments, Amy felt as though she were falling right back down to the ground once more. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut.

But then she bounced and Amy received a face-full of Sheldon's chest; they landed upon his bed, the frame pushed against the bed in a half-arsed attempt to provide further floor-space in the narrow little room. The mattress was firmer than hers—no wonder he had complained before—but the soft landing didn't even wind her and the expulsion of breath that left Amy was slow and controlled. As it was expelled, she rolled to her side.

Freed from the pressure of Amy's body, Sheldon had propped himself up, arranging his long limbs into a cross-legged position with one knee nudging Amy's shoulder. They sat there for a moment in comfortable silence, listening to their breathing as it steadily reached the rhythm of what was almost a pendulum, before Sheldon snickered.

"Amy," he managed, before that breathy chuckle left him again. His palm flattened itself against the covers, fingertips brushing hers. "Amy, my Mom will kill—"

"She doesn't have to know. I'll go back through the window early tomorrow. Please."

"If I were you, I'd sooner take your mother than mine."

Amy giggled. "Between the pair of them, I don't think— wait, Sheldon, is this—?"

Any attempts at coherently formed utterances had apparently flown out of the window (it still hung ajar). Her initial effort was cut premature by the revelation of music in the background and Amy had flapped at Sheldon to be silent so as to identify the familiar tones. His stereo buzzed at the lowest possible volume audible to human beings, clearly; only Amy's prior experience with the artist influenced her acknowledgement of the fact that her boyfriend had apparently foregone his precious disdain and was now listening to Joan Jett.

Sheldon flushed. "I was baffled as to why you were so enamoured by her and decided to investigate."

"You're doing this for me?"

"In part, yes, although—"

'_Do you wanna touch—'_

Disregarding the remainder of his sentence, Amy tugged Sheldon towards her by the collar of his t-shirt and pressed her lips to his. They were met with equal fervour on his part, pleasantly surprising Amy, and she suspected that this new-found enthusiasm on his part had something to do with his ever-approaching absence. But she shoved it roughly from her mind, at least for the moment, and leaned in closer

'_Do you wanna touch me there?'_

As they shifted awkwardly, aware of every limb and its corresponding inexperience, Sheldon's palm came to rest upon her bare hip—Amy's shirt had bunched up from the friction and yet she had absolutely no intention of rectifying any of it—and something seemed to shift, a degree of desperation that Amy had managed to quash long ago. It was fuelled by the pressure of his nails against her skin and the solidity of his body next to hers.

'—_baby, won't you please, run your fingers through my hair?'_

They descended into an impulsive series of actions that was simultaneously so atypical of both sets of characteristics and yet that felt so right—ever cheesy, Amy mused—a hypothesis ultimately proved by the lack of protest when she tugged the hem of Sheldon's double-shirts upwards. Her heart was hammering and Amy was almost entirely certain that he was aware of it, because the force it unleashed upon her ribs was so potent and so frequent that it was impossible for awareness to be absent.

'_Can't you see we're wastin' time—'_

He was thin and she was not, yet Amy was struck suddenly by the revelation of her complete and yet rare comfort in her own skin, even given his roaming hands and the juxtaposition of his bony hips against hers.

Her hands found the flat plain of his pale chest again, palms pressed against bare flesh now, and Amy felt her ears burning, because this had featured so heavily in her dreams and yet remained so absent from her waking life that it was almost inconceivable to think that it had traversed the boundary between the imaginary and the wholly tangible.

Amy didn't want to evacuate the moment; she wanted it to extend far into the future, endless and forever reaching. The revelation that such a desire was irrational was ever prevalent and, much to her exasperation, it summoned once more the observation that— well, amongst many things, this wasn't right. Sheldon was _leaving _and Amy didn't think that she could bear to say goodbye if they departed from any semblance of innocence.

She lingered for a moment longer, savouring the contact, before frowning and pulling her head back. "Sheldon," Amy gasped, her breath hot against her own face as it swum back from the echo of Sheldon's. He looked suitably confused. "Sheldon, I can't. We can't. You're leaving."

It didn't make sense when she voiced those concerns, but Sheldon seemed to accept the absurdity of it regardless—perhaps he was relieved that she had given him an express ticket out of the situation; Amy would never find out, neither what had been, nor what could have—and, in such a display of gentlemanly conduct that made her want to reconnect their lips once again, righted Amy's top. Sheldon licked his lips, as though eradicating the presence that had existed there mere seconds before.

"I am."

And then they were lying side by side again—Sheldon on his back, Amy pressed to his side, her face nestled into his neck. There was such a sense of how messed up the entire debacle had progressed to that Amy couldn't quite bear to dedicate much thought to it. However much she endeavoured to do so, however, her mind would veer quite helplessly back to that realm and hot tears would prick in her eyes. She blinked them back, but the soft circles that Sheldon rubbed at the small of her back with an idle hand indicated that she wasn't quite successful.

_Begging on my knees  
>Baby, won't you please,<br>Run your fingers through my hair.  
>- <em>Joan Jett; Do You Wanna Touch Me?_  
><em>


	9. The Dual Flight Departure

**A/N: This is it - the last real chapter! If you can call it that xD I'm aware that this is much shorter than the others, which was sort of intentional. I will be posting an epilogue to finish this off properly, but I'll just say now how grateful and flattered I am with all of your reviews/alerts/etc! Thanks for sticking with me! :3 **

* * *

><p><em>If you leave, don't leave now<br>Please don't take my heart away  
>Promise me just one more night<br>Then we'll go our separate ways  
><em>

It had been weeks since they had last set foot in that church, beneath the soaring ceiling where it had all began, and yet it seemed oddly poignant now, on the eve of Sheldon's departure. The summer was undeniably reaching its termination—August had been upon them before anyone had taken the time to acknowledge its approach and it was leaving with an equal haste—and yet it seemed hotter than before, even in the relative shade of the church itself.

It had been Sheldon's idea, strangely, because in the several months Amy had known him, not once had the boy displayed anything but animosity towards the concept of organised religion and, indeed, the platforms from which they broadcast their verses to the world. He bemoaned the implications of being seen entering such a place, primarily lest his mother observe and get entirely the wrong end of the stick. Amy remained stoically silent on the subject. She could still recall his initial reverence of the place, if not for its religious implications then the silence it boasted.

"There's one thing I certainly shan't miss about this place," Sheldon ventured, pausing to hold the door open for Amy.

"My Mom giving you a death glare every time you see one another in the street?"

He fired her what had evidently been intended to act as a somewhat withering look, evidently Sheldon's speciality, but it was hindered significantly by the slight quirk of his lips as he fought back a smirk. "There is that. I meant, however, the exasperating insistence of my mother that I accompany her here every Sunday. Though I've no doubt that she'll endeavour to find some way to force me into it."

"Sheldon, it's over 5000 miles from here to Germany. I doubt even Jesus would be able to help her by that point."

"You clearly don't know my mother that well."

To be perfectly honest, after the last showdown with her, Amy wasn't entirely certain that she did want to become well-versed in the intimidating and, admittedly, slightly insane antics of Mrs. Mary Cooper. Since the traumatising encounter in her own bedroom, little had passed between the pair of them and it was not something that Amy had any intention of changing in the near future. It was fortunate enough that they had managed to evade detection just a few nights ago.

Disaster had been avoided via a particularly impressive navigation back through Sheldon's window, though those lazy moment, wrapped up half-asleep in each other's arms and the muggy heat even of the night, had been shattered prematurely and so abruptly by the revelation that Sheldon did share the same solitude in his bedroom as Amy could boast. There had been a slam and a minor argument somewhere downstairs, at which point Sheldon had conveniently recalled that, yes, he did share a room, and that the ensuing discussion that would inevitably unfold if George-not so affectionately referred to as "Junior" by his younger brother-discovered an actual girl in his brother's bed.

The following week had passed in something of a blur, which, in retrospect, had been expected, though such a revelation did little to quell the ever crippling sense that Amy had been accosted with - that her life seemed to be careering past without a glance over its shoulder. It was stupid and it was irrational, yet she couldn't shake the feeling. One minor mishap—that being Sheldon's departure for Heidelberg—had thrown her entire routine. For what was perhaps the first time in her life, Amy realised why he treated entropy and a lack of routine with such disdain. It was maddening.

And now there they were, perched in their usual spot in the recently evacuated church. Their pew stood in the centre, the pair of them dwarfed by the soaring stained glass windows that illuminated the floor with their images in the sharp summer sunlight. It wasn't silence that consumed them, though it might well have been; there was a hushed tone to their voices that lent itself to the suggestion of something far more holy than even the deity worshipped within the walls that Amy and Sheldon occupied.

"Fortunately," Amy herself stated then, quirking an eyebrow. "I'll never have to. I doubt she's going to intend to have anything to do with me once you— you know."

It seemed to be an unspoken rule between the pair of them that the imminent termination of any physical relationship, albeit brief, was not to be graced with words. Sheldon stared down to their knees, crossed and bearing their entwined fingers. "She insisted that I write daily. It seems to be a bit melodramatic - I don't know. Would you want me to? Every day, I mean."

"Sheldon, I doubt any measure of letters would make up for 5000 miles."

"It's the next best thing."

With a small sigh, Amy looked at him, brown eyes capturing blue and keeping them there until they'd maintained a degree of eye contact that both ordinarily endeavoured to avoid. "You're going to teach, Sheldon, not to molly-coddle your girlfriend. I'm not your mother; I'll be fine." She paused. "That being said, that doesn't give you permission to forget about me entirely for some exotic woman."

Sheldon looked positively horrified at the thought. "I find your forays into humour exasperating sometimes."

Quite frankly, Amy was tired, too. The summer had brought with it such little exertion—except, perhaps, the painting of Meemaw's shed—and such lazy days that it was strange to be accosted with such an exhaustion, though she imagined that, in some stretch of awful cliché, the possibility, irrespective of the lack of uncertainty, of Sheldon's departure bore a significant influence on her current state of mind.

Amy had long since banished the thought that none of it mattered, because it was the biggest lie that she had ever allowed herself to entertain, even for the briefest of moments. She was desperate to cling to every moment they had left in one another's company, however insignificant it might have seemed and however rapidly they would slip from beneath her fingertips. It was a feeling that settled like lead in the pit of her stomach and Amy thought that it might be worth it, Sheldon's absence, if it meant that such a horrid sensation would be alleviated even in the slightest.

"You look sad," Sheldon commented, inspecting her face with a degree of apparent wariness. The revelation prompted Amy's lips to quirk up ever so slightly into a smile, derived from Sheldon's evident discomfort with any manner of emotional digression, as opposed to any real intention of fending off his suspicion. "Don't be," he continued. "I'll write to you regularly, even if you don't reply to them all. It's okay; I want to. I'll be back over vacation, too - for Thanksgiving and everything. I'll see you soon."

"I don't know if that's possible," mumbled Amy, biting her lip. She felt the hot wave of tears brim to the surface once more, but she wouldn't cry - not anymore.

"What on earth do you mean?"

And, with a moment's hesitation, she began to recount the events of the night before.

Following the frosty argument with her mother, Amy had done her utmost to rise above it all and remain stoic in her standing up for herself, because heaven knew that she wasn't giving up all that pent-up frustration and courage for absolutely nothing. They had operated under a veil of silence for two whole days before Mrs. Fowler had had anything to say on the matter. Round Two, as it were, had begun with another shouting-match, one that naturally elicited much slamming of doors and little to no resolving of the matter at hand. It wasn't until both women had been able to stew in the wake of their shattered relationship that any progress was made.

The final confrontation took place over dinner, under far more serene conditions than the preceding two. There were requests to pass the salt and stilted enquiries as to what one another had been doing with their afternoon, but none of that really seemed particularly notable to Amy until she and her mother arrived at the true matter at hand - something that Mrs. Fowler had evidently intended to impart to her daughter for quite some time.

"Amy, we're moving."

Those two words had left such a wake of collateral damage through Amy's thoughts, particularly those that had been dedicated to deciphering the bizarrely inconceivable concept (she'd gone through the mild trauma of being plucked from various childhood homes so many times before that fateful moment that it was a wonder Amy hadn't merely marched straight up to her room to pack), that she had been rendered momentarily speechless once more.

It transpired that the fears her mother had confessed to Amy at the beginning of the summer, before the debacle with her father had reached a head and things had really gone off the deep-end, were not entirely unfounded after all. Fleetingly, Amy had blamed herself for the renewed detachment from yet another place that she might have grown to call home—it had been a rational fear of her mother's and yet she had disregarded it based upon her own animosity towards her father—but after a point, she wasn't entirely certain what to believe.

Now, sitting cross-legged opposite Sheldon, Amy thought that laying it all out with him might lend itself to some assistance, some light-bulb moment in which everything would make itself apparent to her in sonic clarity. Confessing the news to him, however, only seemed to muddle matters up further.

"What do you mean, moving?" Sheldon frowned, displaying such a rare expression to his features that Amy had every reason to doubt its existence there. It was confusion; she could see the cogs turning and his developing struggle to come to terms with the new piece to the puzzle - one that didn't quite fit the rest of the picture he had been painting for the pair of them. "You only moved here at the start of the summer. That's barely even two months yet."

"My Mom can't keep up with the payments on the house," Amy offered in a small voice. "She wants to move closer to our family. California, she said - Glendale."

"That's more than 5000 miles."

The statement had long since made itself apparent in Amy's own thoughts, because Texas might well have been okay—with his borderline psychotic mother, yes, and Sarah and some degree of normality—but California was as unnatural as its residents, those that Amy would watch on TV and treat with the utmost of scorn.

It didn't fit her and she had no intention of settling (though if their track record was anything to go by, they would hardly be staying there for long). Amy wasn't skinny and she wasn't blonde; she didn't like tanning and shopping and surfing. In many ways, Galveston was hardly different, though her foreign feeling was derived from a discomfort entirely different, and yet, it was far more comforting, perhaps because Amy had always had Sheldon. They didn't fit in, no, but there had been something companionable in that right from the start.

And now here they were, perched on the precipice of something that neither of them had bargained for. Amy could have quite happily sat there in the church 'til kingdom come, were it possible by any shape of the imagination. Closing her eyes, she pitched her head towards her lap and breathed in the musty aroma of the building—the pews, the old Bibles—and tried to dedicate it to an area of her brain that might never allow it to leave. But she didn't possess Sheldon's eidetic memory; Amy felt as though it were perpetually slipping further and further away from her grasp.

* * *

><p>When the day finally arrived—the day that she and Sheldon would part ways for the foreseeable future—Amy found herself in a state of absence. She felt detached from her body, drifting as though she had mastered the art of astral projection that Sheldon would describe from his comic books. Even that revelation—of him—didn't pain her as much as she thought it might. Between being corralled into strict organisation by her mother and navigating the treacherous route of her goodbye with Sarah, Amy hadn't been permitted much time with which to stew in her own thoughts.<p>

As usual, their belongings had been sent ahead. When the dust had finally settled and mother and daughter, relationship under a state of brief appeasement (though without any sort of treaty to seal the deal), crawled up to the airport in a last-minute taxi, Amy had resigned herself to an acceptance of the fact that this was it; this was the curtain call of her moments in Galveston.

It seemed bittersweet, almost, that she hadn't been able to catch a glimpse of Sheldon that morning before he left. His flight had been horrifically early, but it hadn't prevented Amy from setting her alarm with every intention of defying Mary Cooper, that terrifying deity, and saying one final goodbye. It had all been in vain; of course, he _would _ be so prepared as to arrive a good couple of hours before it was necessary.

Her own mother had evidently taken a leaf out of Sheldon's book, because, disregarding a minor hiccup at the check-in desk (Amy had been far too busy hiding her face in utter humiliation to dedicate much notice to the details of the debacle), their time in departures was uneventful. Amy had long since finished her gargantuan tome of Shakespeare and worked steadily through a series of sketches, before boredom inevitably struck and she began to wander - both in mind and physically.

The path that her feet came to tread through the terminal was foreign and not merely because Amy hadn't been able to accustom herself with Galveston, never mind make use of its airport. She had grown so familiar with the open road and the back of a driver's seat that any other form of transport seemed to be inconceivable. It was a strange enough revelation, but Amy missed it. She craved those highways, that stretched on and on, seemingly never-ending; she wanted the crappy diner food and the uncomfortable slumber that was so frequently shattered by the jerking of just another pothole.

Amy had stopped trailing mindlessly by that point. She acknowledged precisely where she had drawn to a halt—face pressed against the glass of another departure gate, watching the convoy of passengers gather with their hand-luggage—and felt ridiculous - yet she could do nothing but stare. And that was when she saw it.

Sheldon was gangly enough that his shoulders rose a good head above the small gathering of women behind him, even with his posture compromised by the bag slung over his shoulder. It wasn't until her heart began to pound that Amy realised she had held her breath for every moment of her observation. His movements were slow and yet methodical; she could see his mounting frustration with both his bulky load and the awkwardness of the family in front. His shoulders slumped in a tell-tale sign of frustration and, in doing so, Sheldon inadvertently allowed the bag to slip from its perch. It tumbled back and when he turned to make a grab for it, their gazes met.

Proffering a smile that was as weak as her legs felt, Amy waved. In the ensuing moments, as he was jostled by his fellow passengers, Sheldon merely stared, either as shocked as Amy felt or simply endeavouring to deduce precisely who that nutter in the window was. Irrespective of the distance, however, she could almost see acknowledgement dawn and then Sheldon's own hand was raised, fingers splayed in one last farewell.

It was such a brief encounter and yet so poignant that Amy couldn't quite shake it from her thoughts. She continued to stare even when Sheldon turned one last time. Her eyes didn't leave the skyline until the plane had disappeared into the blinding sunlight, up, over the horizon and away.

_If you leave, I won't cry  
>I won't waste a single day<br>But if you leave, don't look back  
>I'll be running the other way<br>_- Nada Surf; If You Leave


	10. The Reunification Coincidence

**A/N: Holy moly, it's the end. I can't believe I actually finished this xD Thank you so much for reading, even if you hadn't reviewd or anything like that - I hope you enjoyed it! For those who did, thank youuu from the bottom of my heart. I doubt I would have ever got this far if it weren't for your support and such, so thank you! I've started another fic, which was originally intended to be a sequel to this, but then ran off by itself. But maybe I'll churn one out yet; who knows? ;)**

* * *

><p><em>It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal<br>Like you never done before  
>It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal<br>I can't hear you anymore_

The sun was sweltering, its harsh rays shining through the windscreen of Amy's car to such an extent that she was entirely certain sitting in a greenhouse might not be quite so scorching. It seemed to prick her bare arms, each point marked by a freckle, and heat the surface of the steering wheel that she clutched, palms growing ever sweatier by the minute. The windows had been drawn as far down as Amy was able to send them in the hope of coaxing in an absent breeze, yet her efforts did little to elicit any element of respite from the elements.

All at once, she received memories of Texas. It was inexplicable—only perhaps not; the heat had been anticipated there and she could recall as though it were yesterday, not fifteen years in the past—and yet the thoughts hurtled towards her with all the velocity of a freight train: a painful jolt to the chest that so long had passed and yet with so little recollection of those summer months of her childhood. Ahead, the traffic lights made the inevitable transition to red and it was just as well - Amy's thoughts had long since strayed from the road.

Since that last flight from Galveston, the first and last marker of a new start, of sorts (the last of her road-trips; the last extraction from a home that had yet to be so), they had settled, she and her mother, in a state of anxious lingering in California that had extended for so long that its epithet—a home, not a house—had finally become that which Amy had yet to boast. It was only a slight comfort; her remaining years in high school and then, for a slight continuation, into her adult years, were spent in solitude.

It wasn't as though she particularly minded; Amy was of the inclination to attach herself to books rather than people, at least when the latter failed her. There was something companionable in the silence of the printed word that didn't mock her bespectacled appearance, nor her penchant for rather frumpy clothing. She was comforted by the silent companionship in a manner that she hadn't felt since— well, since Galveston and there it was again, the influx of emotion that chronicled her thoughts.

Amy wasn't entirely sure why these memories had chosen to rear their collective head now of all moments. She hadn't spoken to him in years; their correspondence via letters had begun with the most admirable of intentions and Sheldon, true to his word, had sent her one for every day that he was absent. Amy's own responses were sporadic, but heartfelt, and yet as the months trickled past into years, their communication had faded into the background. The final letter, rather poignantly (painfully so; she'd since blocked it from memory), arrived on the second anniversary their separation at the airport.

The lights had changed once more and off she went, driving through Pasadena in something of a daze. The irresponsibility of it struck Amy, but for the life of her, she couldn't draw her thoughts from Texas and then further, from her childhood and the events that had shaped her adult life: the actions and inactions of her family and the highways in between. For old time's sake, Amy found herself trawling through the radio until something suitably old wound its way to her ears.

_Don't think twice, it's alright. _

She allowed the dulcet tones of Dylan to lull her, to bring her down from the frantic grasping for those snippets of her adolescence. He sung of hope and peace and freedom and Amy knew that, although it wasn't yet tangible, there was something of a ray of optimism of her own across the horizon. The lyrics still swam through her head even as she pulled to a stop in the car-park of her destination. The address of her new-found friend from yoga class (it hadn't been an activity she had enjoyed, for reasons that Amy hoped to be self-explanatory) had been committed to memory despite being uttered only once. It was a prospect that Amy hadn't considered allowing to slip from her mind.

Penny lived on the fourth floor of an apartment complex that was, she noted sourly, apparently very poorly managed, if the dilapidated state of the elevator's "Out of Order" sign was anything to go by. It was little wonder, Amy added to her steadily increasing bank of personal commentary, that she was so toned; clambering up four flights of stairs so frequently would certainly have its effects on a girl.

_My thighs will be like steel by the time I'm through with this. _

The thought was not quite as comforting as it might have been, because, by the time Amy finally rapped her knuckles on the door to apartment 4B, she was struggling to catch her breath. The scarlet of her cheeks was in part embarrassment when Penny answered the door to an exhausted Amy.

"Hey, Amy! We were getting worried about you there."

"Sorry I'm late. I had an.. unfortunate run in with several flights of stairs."

Penny laughed and Amy felt a swell of acceptance that she managed to smother with a small smile of greeting to Bernadette, another yoga friend, who also appeared in the doorway. She held her bag, slung loosely on her shoulder, and it was then that Amy realised that she was indeed _very _late. They were already preparing to leave.

Indeed, no sooner had the revelation struck her did Amy step aside to allow them both through the door, standing somewhat awkwardly by as Penny struggled to juggle her heels ("I sure ain't walking down those stairs with that many inches!"), her purse and the simple act of locking her door. She rocked back and forth on her own heels (flats, more accurately; she'd yet to brave the precarious art of tottering around on high heels) as she waited, ceasing only in her rhythmic pendulum when a short squeal from Bernadette shocked her into a jump.

"Howie!"

The small blonde hurried past Amy, who followed her hasty path to the arms of a somewhat vertically challenged (alright, so it was an understatement) male. In Amy's own giddiness that she had actually been invited out with two real-life women, both of whom were far more attractive than she could hope to be, she had failed to hear the door of the opposite flat open.

Where that door had once stood, shielding the apartment from prying eyes, now stood three males. One, Amy noted, was evidently Howard, the fiancé that Bernadette and Penny so frequently discussed when they really ought to have been focusing on their breathing techniques (it had been upon pointing out as such that the three had first been acquainted). The other two remained anonymous to Amy and, as such, she stood quietly by as Penny swept forward to greet them.

"Hey, guys! Lemme guess: Comic Book Night?"

"Yup," a short, squinty guy chirped. "As usual." He rolled his eyes behind his glasses. Amy felt compelled to advise him to get his eyesight checked, because that much squinted was hardly natural, but shyness prohibited her to the role of a mere listener. "It's the only part of the Roommate Agreement that isn't inherently traumatising to my digestive system; I really ought to champion it."

"Where is Whack-a-Doodle, anyway?" Penny retorted. _What a strange name. _

Having detached himself from Bernadette, Howard jerks a thumb back into the apartment. "We think he's trying to contact his home planet. Keeps tapping away on Facebook. We might have to stage an intervention."

That's it; Amy couldn't help herself. "There's much debate about the long-term effectiveness of interventions," she commented, poking her glasses further up her nose with a nervous finger. "Though the initial study is somewhat flawed and out-dated, I believe it has some merit."

They blinked owlishly at her, as though finally acknowledging her presence in the midst of the elusive nature of one Whack-a-Doodle, until Penny realised somewhat belatedly that Amy's own identity was shrouded in mystery. She placed a hand on Amy's shoulder and said:

"Oh, guys, this is—"

"Amy?"

"_Sheldon?"_

Over the shoulders of his three companions, there he stood, towering in the doorway and looking more baffled than Amy had ever seen him. A stunned silence followed, not only on the part of those directly involved, but their companions too, who glanced between both Sheldon and Amy as though both had announced that they were next in line to the throne of the Great Britain. There was some movement to say something, including a particularly spirited attempt on Penny's part that ended in nothing more than an incoherent noise. Leonard finally elected to take one for the team.

"You know what, I'm not even going to ask."

Off he went down the stairs, leaving the mute Asian fellow to trot duly behind, closely flanked by Bernadette and Howard and, finally, a reluctant Penny, who still eyed Sheldon with bemusement. They were left alone, an awkward silence swelling in the space between them.

"What are you doing here?" Amy finally blurted, wringing her hands closely together.

Sheldon pursed his lips. "I live here, therefore I believe it would be far more apt for myself to posit the question to you."

She smiled—he was still the same Sheldon and that was comforting on more than one level—and, to Amy's mild surprise, he mirrored the gesture. There were so many unsaid words between them, consuming just over a decade's worth of silence, and yet that fleeting tension seemed to have lifted for the moment. Sheldon jerked his head towards the staircase, indicating the desire to follow his friends, and she complied. They took the first flight without speaking.

Hesitantly, Amy reached out with tentative fingertips and brushed the palm that had been unconsciously bumping against hers as they descended the stairs. She glanced fleetingly up at his face, but Sheldon stared stoically ahead. Taking her prior experience—admittedly, all those years ago—as law, Amy slipped her hand into his, entwining their fingers together and giving his hand a small squeeze.

When Sheldon squeezed back, Amy thought she might have simply died from the happiness of it all. Looking ahead, she grinned widely.

_I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' walking down the road  
>I once loved a woman, a child I'm told<br>I give her my heart but she wanted my soul  
>But don't think twice, it's all right<br>_- Bob Dylan; Don't Think Twice, It's All Right


End file.
